I’m seeing the same issue if itstool is installed on Debian Bookowrm (itstool 2.0.6), Alpine 3.19 (itstool 2.0.7-r1) and Alpine 3.20 (itstool 2.0.7-r2) ever since i18n was introduced in 395d433eb968186af211ed61ac5dac007f152d42

The failing test is the first one in tests/project/frameworks/6 gettext/data3/meson.build and it only runs if itstool is installed and newer than or equal to 2.0.6. Patching the version check to always fail avoids any test failing on Debian Bookowrm and Alpine 3.19 (i’ll open another issue shortly for 3.20 if none exists yet) Looking at the expected check_str and actual f.read() output it seems like one category of translations is missing:

running tests for project 'gettext example'
E
finished 1 tests, 0 expected fail, 1 fail, 0 skipped
fail    0.03s test xml translation
stdout: 'Expected '<p xml:lang="de">Dies ist <code>Text</code> mit <em>eingebetteten XML Tags</em>. Toll!</p>'  got  
'<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<component type="console-application">
  <id>com.mesonbuild.test.intlprog</id>

  <name>Test</name>

  <name xml:lang="ru">Тест</name>
  <summary>Application</summary>
  <summary xml:lang="ru">Приложение</summary>

  <metadata_license>FSFAP</metadata_license>
  <project_license>FSFAP</project_license>

  <description>
    <p>
      Test Application
    </p>
    <p xml:lang="ru">Тестовое приложение</p>
    <p>
      International greeting.
    </p>
    <p xml:lang="de">Internationale Gruss.</p>
    <p xml:lang="fi">Maailman tervehdys.</p>
    <p xml:lang="ru">Межнациональное приветствие.</p>
    <p>
      This is <code>text</code> with <em>embedded XML tags</em>. Nice!
    </p>
  </description>

  <icon type="stock">meson-unittest-intlprog</icon>

  <categories>
    <category>Development</category>
    <category>Building</category>
  </categories>

  <provides>
    <binary>intlprog</binary>
  </provides>
</component>
'
'

This should be fixed