gettext-stub is a little stub which can be used to replace gettext. This is useful if you are tight on space and do not need fancy stuff like your computer speaking the oldest dialects of Chinese, yet want to build an application depending on gettext.
I started building it while preparing the image for a new mini-server, which I did not want to load with bloat. Still I wanted to run Irssi on it, so I needed to compile glib - which unfortunately requires gettext. I tried building glib with this fakery and it accepted it without complaining.
Glib runs with it like a charm, and Irssi also accepts it. The
only thing you should be aware of is possible warnings on discarded
qualifiers on return types or so. As it works, I don't bother fixing it.
Also, make install will report missing .mo
files (as this stub does nothing, it doesn't read these files and also
doesn't create them) but it will still continue installing glib.
65M gettext-0.17 20K gettext-stub
Actually, the 20K there are the filesystem overhead for five files.
There is a page about this project on Freshmeat.