# Intro gettext-mini is a clone of gettext-tiny but made with autotools. ** PROJECT STATUS: unstable, porting in progress ** Original source: https://github.com/AdelieLinux/gettext-tiny Just like gettext-tiny, this is a lightweight replacement for GNU's `gettext`, which is incredibly bloated and takes a lot of time to build (in the order of an hour on slow devices). The most notable component is `msgfmt` which is used to create binary translation files in the .mo format out of textual input files in .po format. this is the most important tool for building software from source, because it is used from the build processes of many software packages. Unlike the GNU implementation of `msgfmt`, this project's implementation can expand input strings containing so-called sysdep strings into a constant translation table. sysdep strings were glued as an after-thought onto the GNU implementation to deal with system-specific format strings, and in the GNU implementation those are created at runtime, which requires mapping the entire .mo file into read/write memory locations, thereby wasting precious RAM for read-only data that could otherwise be shared among processes. Other parts of gettext-mini such as xgettext and msgmerge are still stubs, but they are sufficient to build many packages. This project is geared for musl libc, so `libintl` will be a compat library providing a few compatibility symbols meant to be used together with the libintl built-in into recent musl versions. the compatibility symbols help to get past configure scripts that insist on using only the GNU gettext suite. additionally, it can be entirely disabled.