>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?)
>
It's not true. We could
1) just add a call to aclocal somewhere (part of normal autoconf
infrastrcture)
2) write a simpler version of these macros.
>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.
>
>
With these ideas, subversion is more and more complicated, as it
deviates from what everyone else does and without good reasons. If we
just use the standard build procedure, there's nothing subversion
specific a developer should care for. But when we add a bunch of
hand-written subversion specific macros we are adopting a new child to
feed =).
>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?
>
>
One advantage I can think of is plurals handling. But yes, we can target
any gettext implementation, but doing so will be more complex because
you never know which level of support each UNIX gettext has. That's way
many projects are now just requiring the use of GNU gettext. NLS is an
optional feature anyway.
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Received on Tue Mar 30 22:10:10 2004