Re: [help-gengetopt] Feature requests: gettext

[Lorenzo Bettini]

Tim Post wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-09-16 at 10:32 +0200, Lorenzo Bettini wrote:
>
> > I hope that gettext functionalities will be added to getopt 
> > implementation soon, at least in glibc...
>
> I doubt it, and here's why:
>
> Getopt is a corner case in userspace libc as far as internationalization
> goes, almost everything uses it. If someone wanted to put program 'foo'
> on an initrd for instance, they'd either have to statically link against
> gettext or make room for another dso depending on how many things used
> it. Then there's the dictionaries, etc.
>
> Busybox is a good example.
>
> If I use .. say .. libxml, I know that I have a dependency on something
> beyond libc(x). Parsing command line options should not create such a
> dependency. 
>
> I'd be all for a separate getopt_intl implementation though. Not only
> would it help users, it would make producing locale specific manuals a
> cinch with something like help2man. That should probably be based on gnu
> getopt, since gnu getopt has more perks than most and is by far the
> noisiest in its internal error reporting.

Well, adding gettext functionalities to getopt would not necessarily 
require gettext dependence: though I don't know much about gettext, in 
the programs that used it there's always an #ifdef check to see whether 
gettext is available: if it's not a call to a gettext function, say 
foo(x) would reduce simply to x.

Moreover, I'm pretty sure to remember that there are some 
implementations of getopt with internalization.

this is just for discussion: I'm not a big fun of internalization, and, 
as you might have understood, I've never used it :-)

cheers
        Lorenzo

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Lorenzo Bettini, PhD in Computer Science, DI, Univ. Torino
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