I never responded to this message. It's time, I guess.
John Darrington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> On Sat, Jun 03, 2006 at 11:36:37AM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
>
> I think it's simply impractical to be in more than one locale at
> a time for messages. For one thing, calls to the _() and
> gettext() functions would have to be postponed until well after
> the point they're called now, so that we could call them once for
> each locale we're in. So I'd think that SET OLANG would change
> the language for all messages, regardless of where they're going.
>
> I don't think it's impractical. Like you say, it'll mean changing
> instances of msg(_("xxx")); to msg(N_("xxx"); and putting the
> responsibility of calling gettext to the message delivery. It's a
> little slower and a little more complex, but I think it may be
> worthwhile.
>
> In general, SET OLANG isn't supposed to change the language of
> messages. It changes the language of the output. So if I'm preparing
> a report for a Japanese journal, I can SET OLANG=Japanese, but I'll
> still get error messages in my own language.
Well, we can do this. I am concerned about some things:
* Messages that are constructed by some process that is
more complex than passing the return value of _() to
printf(). verify_valid_command() in
src/language/command.c is a good example. Perhaps
these are bad for translation anyhow and should be
changed to avoid constructing a string, or perhaps we
would need to introduce a more powerful mechanism such
as a callback function, but something must be done.
* Similarly, how do we deal with functions like
ngettext()? Our mechanism will need to be powerful
enough to handle that, at least.
* There is only one current locale at a time and we'll
end up switching them often. setlocale() might be
slow. (Maybe this isn't a big deal. glibc has
nonstandard functions for fast locale switching.)
--
"Sanity is not statistical."
--George Orwell
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