Re: [bug-gettext] replacing autotools with meson?

[Bruno Haible]

Alexander Kanavin wrote:
> Yocto is not a distribution, and it does not provide any pre-built 
> binaries or images. It is a toolkit for creating Linux-based 
> distributions aimed at embedded use cases. What this means is that 
> anyone who wants to create such a distribution and produce images and 
> packages that can be placed on their target devices needs to configure 
> exactly what gets built and how, and then perform the build on their 
> development machine iteratively, until they are happy with the outcome. 
> So we aggressively parallelize and cache everything: when multiple 
> software packages can be built at the same time, they are. Build 
> artifacts are placed into a disk cache, and reused whenever possible. 

I see. Thanks for explaining.

Now, as mentioned in the other mail, try to see gettext as the union of
gettext-runtime and gettext-tools. You can configure, "make", "make install"
each of these subdirectories separately.

> For what its worth we can build a complete Linux system, including the 
> gcc cross toolchain used during the build in around 1-1.5 hours 
> depending on the build hardware used.

gettext-tools is in the same category as the cross toolchain: they are
needed at build time, but not at runtime.

> Which brings us to gettext. It is on a critical path for almost anything 
> (in the dependency tree it comes shortly after building the 
> cross-compilation C toolchain, including cross-gcc, and is needed for 
> almost anything else).

These "almost anything else" need gettext-tools as a build dependency
and only gettext-runtime at runtime. So this should reduce your critical
path (by remvoving gettext-tools from it).

Bruno