Building gettext without libtextstyle

[Santiago Vila]

Hello.

The Debian gettext package intentionally removes support
for libtextstyle. The rationale for doing so is in this patch
by Zack Weinberg, which reads like this:

 libtextstyle is not packaged for Debian and depends on libcroco, which
 is unmaintained and has known security bugs.  Do not build the
 embedded copy, and do not look for any version of it on the system.
 Use the Gnulib module libtextstyle-dummy to satisfy the gettext-tools'
 use of it; this module is already available in the upstream sources
 but needs one (relatively trivial) missing feature added.

 This patch is not suitable for upstream.  Upstream ought to split
 libtextstyle out to its own source tarball and overhaul it to remove
 the dependency on libcroco, at which point it could be packaged
 normally and gettext could build-depend on it normally, but I suspect
 they will not be in any hurry to do this.

The full patch is available here:

https://sources.debian.org/src/gettext/0.21-13/debian/patches/03-disable-libtextstyle.patch/

The problem with this approach is that I have to carry the patch with every new
gettext release.

So, I wonder if we could have another easier way to do this. Either by
removing the dependency on libcroco, as suggested by Zack, or maybe
by adding a new configure option "--without-libtextstyle".

In the last case, I would assume that the required changes would
probably not be a lot larger than the current Debian patch, just
the required bits to make it conditional instead of hardcoded.

Thanks.