[digiKam-users] Couple questions about building digikam

[2895qgvg6v at liamekaens.com]

I'm not sure whether to send these questions to digikam-users or 
digikam-devel, but since I've seen a few messages here suggesting that 
some people build digiKam from source, I'll try here first.  If this 
belongs in digikam-devel, please let me know.

I'm setting up a Linux (debian/testing) virtual machine in which to 
build digiKam so I can experiment with it to learn a little bit about 
how it works, and then try to contribute by fixing some bugs and/or 
making some enhancements (e.g. solve the issues I described in 
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/digikam-users/2020-August/031169.html), 
and I have a couple questions.

I tried "git clone https://invent.kde.org/graphics/digikam.git digikam" 
on a partition with 1.3GB of free space and ran out of space.  How much 
disk space is required to checkout the digiKam source code?
Also, how much additional space is required to compile, and is there a 
difference in the space required when using bootstrap.local versus 
bootstrap.linux?

I attempted to install all the dependencies did manage to run 
bootstrap.linux, and it complained that I didn't have gettext, which 
surprised me because Gettext is listed in the section "Dependencies To 
Process Translations Files (optional)".  Is 
https://www.digikam.org/api/index.html#externaldeps correct that Gettext 
is optional, and if so what do I need to do get bootstrap.linux to 
complete successfully without it installed (I looked at files shown in 
the backtrace, but didn't see a clear way to avoid the check for Gettext)?

thanks for your help,
Peter

PS: FWIW, I'm close to retiring after a 40+ year system software 
development career, so I'm hoping to soon have more time to contribute 
to open source software projects that I find useful and interesting.