iconv - has a circular dependency of gettext

[Dr. David Kirkby]

As discussed before, iconv is needed to build R now - at least on Solaris and
Cygwin. Reading the README for iconv I find there is a circular dependency on
GNU gettext. One can etiher

1) Build iconv, then build gettext, then build iconv again. OR
2) Build gettext, build iconv, then build gettext again.

This is a bit of a nuisance of course.

This looks like to me the GNU gettext package is needed too. This could either

a) Be a separate package, in which case the build system will have to rebuild
one of them twice. OR

b) Make a spkg iconv-1.31.1-and-gettext-0.17

and stick both libraries in the one package. Then I could arrange one of them is
built twice.

We might get away without having GNU gettext. At least on Solaris, gettext is
included. The functionality in iconv then might be sufficient to build R and
whatever else needs iconv, but this not certain.

Assuming the worst, and R will not build with just installing gettext, what way
would be best to proceed with this?

Dave

[Ben Goodrich]

If I am interpreting it correctly, I believe the first sentence of

http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-admin.html#Useful-libraries-and-programs

implies that the R source includes a minimal version of gettext that
would be sufficient as long as one is not interested in doing new
translations.

[Dr. David Kirkby]

Yes, that looks good. One less problem to worry about at least for R on Solaris.
There are issues on Cygwin too, which might mean gettext is needed for Cygwin,
though I have no idea about that. I'll build a package for iconv first, which
should hopefully allow R to install on Solaris.

Dave