Re: [help-gengetopt] Feature requests: gettext

[Tim Post]

On Tue, 2008-09-16 at 11:43 +0200, Lorenzo Bettini wrote:
> 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.

In most scenarios, gettext is an external dso. So using getopt would
mean a need to link against it (either dynamically or statically).
Similar to how you inherit ncurses by using readline.

However, getopt is part of libc(x), current use of it means you expect
only to link against libc(x).

A "hello world" program using getopt that normally depended only on core
libc would then inherit a dependency on the gettext dso (and need to set
flags accoringly).

Changing it now would break a lot of builds.

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

Do you remember which one(s)? When bringing getopt to HelenOS userspace
libc, I thought I looked at all of them .. but don't remember seeing
gettext.

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

I'm guilty of not using it much either. I do agree that an
internationalized version should appear, but needs to be separate from
what thousands if not hundreds of thousands of programs are currently
using.

Its an interesting discussion :)

Cheers,
--Tim