Re: Build from git broken - missing gperf?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2024 19:35:59 +0000
> 
> I found it was being rebuilt by "make" because a dependency was updated:
> 
> $ ls -l gnulib/lib/iconv_open-aix.gperf 
> -rw-rw-r-- 1 g g 1.8k Jan 31 18:24 gnulib/lib/iconv_open-aix.gperf
> 
> which came from a gnulib update to another module (all that happened
> was that copyright years changed from 2023 to 2024).
> 
> Gnulib documents that "gperf" is a required tool for using the "iconv_open"
> module.  It's not especially easy, I find, to find why a particular gnulib
> module was brought in, but looking at the files under the "modules" directory
> of a gnulib checkout, I found the chain of dependencies
> 
> uniconv/u8-strconv-from-enc -> uniconv/u8-conv-from-enc -> striconveha
>   -> striconveh -> iconv_open
> 
> (Of course, there could other dependency chains that also brought this module
> in.)
> 
> Short of extirpating this dependency, the only solution appears to
> be to require anyone building from git to have gperf installed, which
> doesn't seem like a good situation, as it was never required before.
> 
> I don't know if uniconv/u8-conv-from-enc is a necessary module.  It's
> not easy to find out how the module is used as the documentation is
> lacking, but it appears to match libunistring.  The documentation is
> here:
> https://www.gnu.org/software/libunistring/manual/html_node/uniconv_002eh.html
> 
> I found uses of "u8_strconv_from_encoding" throughout the XS code,
> although most of the uses (I didn't check them all) have "UTF-8" as one
> of the arguments, making it appear that we are converting from UTF-8
> to UTF-8.

Should we ask the Gnulib folks to help us out?