[oe] DEPENDS="gettext" vs. DEPENDS="virtual/libintl"

[Geoffrey Wossum]

On Friday 06 June 2008 05:24:50 pm Henning Heinold wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 06, 2008 at 05:06:11PM -0500, Geoffrey Wossum wrote:
> > I'm working on exorcizing gettext as a requirement for building OE. 
> > Since glib-2.0 absolutely has to have libintl, I've found an alternate
> > way of providing.  uClibc's libintl stub has a pretty bad case of bitrot,
> > but I found proxy-libintl, which was written to get GNOME onto Windows. 
> > By setting proxy-libintl up as the PREFERRED_PROVIDER for
> > virtual/libintl, I can get past glib-2.0 now.
> >
> > The problem now is that some packages explicitly list "gettext" in their
> > DEPENDS.  Is this just legacy from before virtual/libintl was created? 
> > Is there any reason why these can't all be changed to "virtual/libintl"?

> I suggest looking into this packages to see why they need gettext, maybee
> they need special tools, which only gettext provides.

I masked out the gettext package, and it turned out the only package my 
current system needs that had a DEPENDS for gettext was popt.  I changed 
popt's DEPENDS from gettext to virtual/libintl, and it built fine.  I won't 
be able to test out my gettext free build on hardware until Monday, though.

It seems to me that if a package needs headers or libraries from gettext, a 
DEPENDS of "virtual/libintl" would be fine.  If a package needs tools from 
gettext to be built, then it should be depending on "gettext-native" instead 
of "gettext", I would think.  

---
Geoffrey