readme: announce the fisrt edition of readme

made by rofl0r

README.md

@@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
+# Intro
+gettext-tiny provides lightweight replacements for tools typically used
+from the `GNU gettext` suite, 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.
+
+our `msgfmt` implementation was initially a fake implementation that would
+just output the english input string as the translation, which is sufficient
+to get software to work, but it has since grown into a complete implementation.
+unlike the GNU implementation, it can even 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-tiny such as `xgettext` and `msgmerge` are still stubs,
+but they are sufficient to build many packages.
+
+since `musl` libc, our preferred target, didn't provide a `libintl` in the past,
+(and it's also part of `GNU gettext`) we also ship a no-op libintl providing
+a header and a library.
+
+it comes in two flavours:
+
+1) nop: gettext functions just return the input string as translation
+2) musl: 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.
+
+
+# Compilation/Installation
+
+```
+make LIBINTL=FLAVOR
+make DESTDIR=pkgdir prefix=/ install
+```
+
+where FLAVOR can be one of NONE, MUSL, NOOP (as detailed above).
+you can override any variables used in the Makefile (such as `CFLAGS`) by
+appending them to the `make` invocation, or by saving them into a file called
+`config.mak` before running `make`.