Re: Groff circular dependency

[Bruno Haible]

Alexander von Gluck IV wrote:
> Just an interesting pain-point on bootstraps... the recent(ish) addition of 
> groff for the
> man pages has created a circular dependency loop.
> 
> gettext -> groff -> ghostscript_gpl -> fontconfig -> gettext
> A configure flag to bypass generating man-pages in gettext (and bypassing the
> groff requirement) would be a welcome addition (vs alias groff='true') :-)

When you bootstrap a system, it's normal to build some package twice,
once with some --disable-... options, or with "make -k" to only build
binaries that can be built with the tools present so far. (How else
would you bootstrap glibc and gcc? They need each other.)

In particular, I'm pretty sure you can build fontconfig without having
gettext installed (maybe with --disable-nls ?). Then build everything up to
groff and gettext. And then you can build fontconfig once again.

Bruno