gettext integration (was Re: [PATCH] Do not use gettextize and i18n round 2 Re: I18n: The gettext proposal)

On Tue, 2004-03-30 at 12:25, Justin Erenkrantz wrote:

> I do welcome your efforts to help with the i18n, but I'm not willing to see us
> compromise our build system in the process. -- justin

Let me focus the discussion here. We're trying to answer two questions
right now:

1. Which gettext do we use?

2. How do we integrate it into our build system?

Nicolas wants us to require the use of GNU's gettext. Justin wants us
to be able to use various gettext implementations... either GNU, or
whatever happens to be available.

I just spoke with Justin in IRC, and he's claiming that if we were to
require GNU gettext, we'd have to import 28 m4 files. (Is this really
true?) Justin also claims it would be much easier to write our own
little bit of m4 to detect either GNU gettext or some other native
gettext implementation... so that in essence, our build system would be
much *less* complicated if we allowed multiple gettext implementations.

Finally, Justin is claiming that there's no risk of chaos here: that
the various gettext implementations out there all share a common .po
format... only the .mo files (compiled .po's) are
implementation-specific, because well, the runtime library (libintl) is
implementation-specific as well, just as you'd expect. Not a big deal.

Anyway, does anyone care to refute Justin? :-) He's giving definite
answers to the question above (he's even supplied a patch for #2). I'd
just like to hear if there are any other sides to this story.

For example, I'd like to know why Nicolas thinks we should standardize
on just GNU gettext... does it offer specific features we need?

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Received on Tue Mar 30 21:15:42 2004