libiconv and gettext are now stubbed in OpenWrt

kyak bas at bmail.ru
Thu Jan 6 10:02:18 EST 2011


Hi!

As some of you already know, libiconv and gettext (libintl) are now stubbed 
in OpenWrt. What was known previously as libiconv is now renamed to 
libiconv-full and gettext is renamed to gettext-full.

I can understand why it has been done. OpenWrt is tending towards ultimate 
optimizations - and it includes ripping off, stubbing and whatever else 
techniques to gain (sometimes questionable) speed/size improvement.

However, Ben NanoNote is not a router. I prefer thinking about Ben as a 
desktop (kind of limited, though).

In recent months, Ben has added support for UTF-8 and i18n I/O in console 
applications. OpenWrt had no such features, starting from uclibc and busybox 
and ending with ncurses.

Now when libiconv and gettext are stubbed, a lot of packages depending on 
libiconv and libintl might start having problems. They won't get built or 
won't have features supported by that libraries.

OpenWrt developers realized that such stub would cause many problems and 
began to "unstub" it by adding some features and now they call libiconv 
"Tiny drop-in replacement for the GNU Character set conversion library".

It is supposed that those who want full versions of libiconv and gettext 
will use libiconv-full and gettext-full packages.
Well, it is possible to do this for individual packages in openwrt-packages 
git, but what about all other packages depending on libiconv or libintl from 
openwrt feeds?

I'd like to know if there is a way to get the full versions back? Overriding 
these libs from openwrt-packages doesn't work because libiconv and gettext 
are in feeds themselves and not in base system.




More information about the discussion mailing list


interactive