Hello,

This proposal largely has to do with switching to Musl 1.2's gettext 
implementation instead of GNU gettext.  Doing so will allow for more 
programs to be built with gettext support.

In order to switch to Musl 1.2's gettext implementation, we will need to 
switch to gettext-tiny, which is a set of programs that generate gettext 
catalogs in the format that Musl's implementation expects.

Other distributions in the Musl ecosystem have already switched to 
gettext-tiny, such as Sabotage and Adelie.

## Benefits to Alpine

* GNU Gettext is removed from the bootstrap path.

This simplifies the bootstrap path as we do not have to deal with building 
a gettext implementation.  Instead, gettext-tiny can become part of 
$makedepends_host, so we do not have to worry about bootstrapping it.

* The gettext locales generated by gettext-tiny are smaller.

This means the $pkgname-lang packages will be slightly smaller than they 
are now.

* The gettext implementation built into musl does not require any
   additional dependencies.

This means that our dependency trees will be simpler, as they will no 
longer have to deal with GNU libintl.

## Contingency Plan

If there is a problem with gettext-tiny, we will switch back to GNU 
gettext and libintl.

Ariadne

Hello,

sounds good to me. How would we proceed here?

* Make musl-dev provide gettext.h by default
* Remove gettext-dev as dep everywhere, replace with gettext-tiny
* Done?

Regards,

Rasmus Thomsen


On 6 April 2021 23:37:48 CEST, Ariadne Conill <ariadne@dereferenced.org> wrote:
>Hello,
>
>This proposal largely has to do with switching to Musl 1.2's gettext 
>implementation instead of GNU gettext.  Doing so will allow for more 
>programs to be built with gettext support.
>
>In order to switch to Musl 1.2's gettext implementation, we will need
>to 
>switch to gettext-tiny, which is a set of programs that generate
>gettext 
>catalogs in the format that Musl's implementation expects.
>
>Other distributions in the Musl ecosystem have already switched to 
>gettext-tiny, such as Sabotage and Adelie.
>
>## Benefits to Alpine
>
>* GNU Gettext is removed from the bootstrap path.
>
>This simplifies the bootstrap path as we do not have to deal with
>building 
>a gettext implementation.  Instead, gettext-tiny can become part of 
>$makedepends_host, so we do not have to worry about bootstrapping it.
>
>* The gettext locales generated by gettext-tiny are smaller.
>
>This means the $pkgname-lang packages will be slightly smaller than
>they 
>are now.
>
>* The gettext implementation built into musl does not require any
>   additional dependencies.
>
>This means that our dependency trees will be simpler, as they will no 
>longer have to deal with GNU libintl.
>
>## Contingency Plan
>
>If there is a problem with gettext-tiny, we will switch back to GNU 
>gettext and libintl.
>
>Ariadne

-- 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

Hello,

On 2021-04-06 15:37:48 -0600, Ariadne Conill wrote:
> ## Benefits to Alpine
> ## Contingency Plan

Out of curiosity, both in this and the other thread you are listing just
the benefits and contingency plan. Are there any detriments as well? Any
features we (well, the program) would lose access to?

I have no idea what the feature matrix for both the implementations is
and if anything interesting/useful would be lost with the switch.



Just to add, it's not that I disagree with the switch (or even, it's not
like my opinion matters anyway :) ), but I would like to see these
proposals to be more balanced, even if the "Detriments" section would
contain single sentence "None, both have identical features.".

W.

-- 
There are only two hard things in Computer Science:
cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.

Hello,

On Wed, 7 Apr 2021, Rasmus Thomsen wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> sounds good to me. How would we proceed here?
> 
> * Make musl-dev provide gettext.h by default
> * Remove gettext-dev as dep everywhere, replace with gettext-tiny
> * Done?

Precisely.

Ariadne