gettext/-devel convert-archive usage and impact of packaging --without-git

[Brian Inglis]

On 2025-07-23 12:24, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Hi Brian,
> 
>> Dev has issues with CI conflicts between "native" CI git installed and Cygwin
>> git package install with gettext-devel, asking whether and why gettext-devel
>> requires git(-archive?) and whether we could drop git from the (manual additions
>> to) gettext-devel package install dependencies on Cygwin?
>>
>> It is undocumented and unclear to me what role
>> gettext-tools/misc/convert-archive plays in packaging other packages using
>> gettext/-devel, and what is the impact if I package gettext/-devel --without-git?
> 
> The 'autopoint' program can install the infrastructure of any earlier gettext
> release, so that dev teams can have the same 'configure' file even if individual
> developers have different versions of gettext installed (assuming they use
> the same versions of autoconf and automake).
> 
> Therefore GNU gettext comes with an archive of the prior versions. This
> archive would be more than 30 MB large without compression. Different ways
> exist to compress it, see [1]. 'git', 'cvs', and the 'xz' compression program
> are all good choices.
> 
> If you build GNU gettext without a dependency to the 'git' package, the
> archive's format should not use git (otherwise there is a risk that
> 'autopoint' will not work). Probably you will not want a dependency to 'cvs'
> either, since that is outdated. The other good choice is thus a dependency
> on the 'xz' program. So, try to configure GNU gettext with
>    --without-git --without-cvs --without-bzip2 --with-xz

Thanks Bruno,

You provide uncompressed archive.dir.tar in your .tar.lz, and we package it as 
the default .tar.xz:

$ tar -tvf …/gettext-0.22.5.tar.lz …/gettext-tools/misc/archive.dir.tar
… 32931840 2024-02-21 05:36 …/gettext-tools/misc/archive.dir.tar
$ tar -tvf …/gettext-devel-0.22.5-1.tar.xz usr/share/gettext/archive.dir.tar.xz
… 413232 2024-02-26 09:46 usr/share/gettext/archive.dir.tar.xz

IIUC, git is not required, we can drop git and bz2 as build-deps, package with 
the --without-{bz2,cvs,git} config flags, and not really affect existing or 
future packages.

Is that our situation?

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis              Calgary, Alberta, Canada

La perfection est atteinte                   Perfection is achieved
non pas lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à ajouter  not when there is no more to add
mais lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à retrancher  but when there is no more to cut
                                 -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry