tags 33211 notabug
close 33211
stop
Hell0,
On 2018-10-30 3:33 p.m., scootergrisen wrote:
I wonder if its a mistake that in Fedora i can see coreutils.mo in both:
/usr/share/locale/*/LC_TIME
/usr/share/locale/*/LC_MESSAGES
They seem to be identical.
This is not a mistake (nor a bug).
Not only they are identical, one is a symlink to the other:
$ cd /usr/local/share/locale/ca
$ ls -log LC_*/coreutils.mo
-rw-r--r-- 1 379478 Dec 27 22:47 LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo
lrwxrwxrwx 1 27 Dec 27 22:47 LC_TIME/coreutils.mo ->
../LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo
coreutils.mo is the only file i see in the /usr/share/locale/*/LC_TIME
folder.
Most programs that use gettext (https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/)
are concerned with user visible messages, hence most of the translation
only use LC_MESSAGES directory, and there's no need for other files.
Few coreutils programs (e.g. date, sort) do care about translation of
time-related strings (e.g. days / month names).
That's why coreutils also uses LC_TIME.
One can ask for the date/time to use one local,
and messages to use another:
$ export LC_TIME=ru_RU.UTF-8
$ export LANGUAGE=ja_JP.UTF-8
$ date
Пт янв 18 01:06:10 MST 2019
$ date -d ABCD
date: `ABCD' は無効な日付です
Should the /usr/share/locale/*/LC_TIME/coreutils.mo files be removed so
there is only the /usr/share/locale/*/LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo files?
No, Both should exist, otherwise setting LC_TIME won't work.
Technically, the translated strings for both messages and time are
stored in the same file - that's why when coreutils is installed,
one is a symlink to the other.
Even more technically, when building from source,
the file "bootstrap.conf" contains the following:
# Other locale categories that need message catalogs.
EXTRA_LOCALE_CATEGORIES=LC_TIME
The directory "./po" is populated with available translation
(e.g. "ru.po" and "ja.po").
During the build, the ".po" files are compiled into binary ".gmo" files.
During installation, the files are copied/symlinked:
$ make install
[...]
make[2]: Entering directory '/home/gordon/projects/coreutils/po'
installing af.gmo as /usr/local/share/locale/af/LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo
installing af.gmo link as /usr/local/share/locale/af/LC_TIME/coreutils.mo
installing be.gmo as /usr/local/share/locale/be/LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo
installing be.gmo link as /usr/local/share/locale/be/LC_TIME/coreutils.mo
[...]
Hope this addresses the issue.
I'm closing this as "not a bug", but discussion can continue by replying
to this thread.
regards,
- assaf
