My native language, as that of many others isn't english. Therefore, even though I feel the english language is a good language, I kind of want to have the system produce messages in my native language.
Seeing that the system has something called a NLS, I set out to explore this world, for the purpose of having the system talk to me in Icelandic. My first trip, was to acquire the sources for the C library, to spot the sources here and see if there was any real support for my native language, and here I found that there indeed was something called 'nls' a directory that contained the messages produced by the C library routines. Armed with an editor, I attacked the directory under the tree, and for an hour I encountered severe battles with files of type 'error.m' and the like, which I overcome and forced to my native language. Taking them head on, I did a make install that forced these changes into a directory '/etc/locale' where now several 'libc.cat' exist, in different languages. Now, whenever I do a touch / as a user, I don't read... touch: /: Permission denied but with my LANG environment variable set to 'is', I get... touch: /: Heimild neitað Now, I got enthusiastic... and I acquired the sh-tools. I wasn't happy with just getting these messages in my native language. I wanted to see date produce... lau 28.des 1996, 03:02:54 CET Instead of the well known... sat des 28 03:02:54 CET 1996 according to the setting in my locale, as given by the data gotten from the wg15-locale.deb package. Compiling this package didn't help any... so, I went GNU, and ackuired the newest release of shell-utils from MIT. Here, running configure, I saw the faul bastard, that was hindering my date to arrive... they didn't accept my 'strftime' routine... so GNU used it's own, and so did Debian shell-utils. Their own versions of 'strftime', bypassing the C-libraries built in configuration for NLS support... knowing, I immediately disposed of the traitor... and recompiled with NLS support... and, of course, the proper LOCALEDIR set to /usr/share/locale instead of GNU's default /usr/local/share/locale. Now, my eyes spotted something called 'gettext' and a directory 'po' in the GNU sh-utils package... armed with native power, I entered and encountered several 'po' files... 'de.po', 'fr.po' and even a 'sv.po' (those swedes are everywhere ;-). The 'sv.po' being closest to me kin, I took them on and after a long battle... an 'is.po' came to the rescue. Finally, I did a 'make install'... committing all these 'po'es to the locale, and now V-time has given me the pleasure of seeing date display: lau 28.des 1996, 03:03:54 CET according to my locale, and doing a... basename --help produces a... Notkun: basename NAFN [ENDING] eða: basename FLAGG Skrifa NAFN án leiðandi efnisyfirlita Ef gefið, fjarlægja hangandi endingu. --help vísa þessa aðstoð og hætta --version vísa útgáfu upplýsingar og hætta Gefðu skýrslu um galla til [EMAIL PROTECTED] instead of ... Usage: basename NAME [SUFFIX] or: basename OPTION Print NAME with any leading directory components removed. If specified, also remove a trailing SUFFIX. --help display this help and exit --version output version information and exit Report bugs to [EMAIL PROTECTED] which occurs when under the 'C' locale. Now, how about a full NLS support under Debian... GNU is going International, as they are saying. So, why not make a package that provides 'libc.cat' files and 'packag.po' files for locales. So, how about it guys? -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
