gettext-devel package dependency on git?

[Brian Inglis]

On 2025-07-22 12:38, Brian Inglis via Cygwin-apps wrote:
> On 2025-07-21 15:27, Matthew Sheets via Cygwin-apps wrote:
>> In troubleshooting issues using Cygwin within GitHub runners, one specific 
>> problem scenario identified is when the Cygwin "git" package is installed.  
>> When that happens, Cygwin's Git installation ends up being executed instead of 
>> GitHub's installation of Git, which obviously doesn't have the same setup, 
>> configuration, etc. as GitHub's own internal install of Git.
>>
>> Usually, these issues can be avoided by simply not including the "git" package 
>> among the list of packages to be installed along with Cygwin [1], but it 
>> appears there are certain cases where Cygwin's "git" package is being pulled 
>> in as a dependency by other Cygwin packages.
>>
>> In particular, "gettext-devel" [2] (source package "gettext") is listing an 
>> explicit dependency on Git, and I am unclear why.  At least on the surface, 
>> GNU Gettext itself does not appear to have any such dependencies [3], and 
>> while the packages don't map one-to-one, Debian packages don't appear to have 
>> such a dependency, either [4].
>>
>> In reviewing the gettext.cygport file [5], "git" is explicitly listed as a 
>> DEPEND (though I do see that use of DEPEND is deprecated [6]) and then again 
>> as a PKG_REQUIRES [7] of gettext-devel [8].  It seems this listed dependency 
>> on git is a result of this manual specification and not Cygport's auto- 
>> detection of package dependencies.
>>
>> Is this explicit listing of "git" as a dependency of "gettext-devel" 
>> necessary?  Can it be removed?
> 
> It appears to be used to access git-archive used by --with-git option to 
> compress some data formats, but I will have to check further to find out what 
> that entails exactly.

Looks like we can drop bz2 and git as the default xz is used anyway.

Another suggestion was that we should include building libtextstyle as recent 
Fedora does.

Does anyone have any experience with libtextstyle and think Cygwin might have 
any issues if that library is included?

-- 
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