Re: [help-gengetopt] Feature requests: gettext

[Tim Post]

Hi Lorenzo, sorry for the delayed reply:

On Sat, 2008-08-16 at 12:01 +0200, Lorenzo Bettini wrote:
> Salvatore Santagati wrote:
> > Hi there,
> > 
> > I  thought,  is if possible implement support for gettext
> > [http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/] into gengetopt ?

> as I had already told Salvatore privately, I've never used gettext 
> (actually I've never used internalization myself in any programming 
> languages), so I'd really appreciate the help of anyone in the list who 
> used gettext: some ideas, some clues on how the generated parser should 
> be modified...

Since getopt and getopt_long have many implementations (GNU, BSD,
OpenSolaris) .. the localized text would be at best '-glish'. By
'-glish' I mean, pick a language and add 'glish', i.e. 'spanglish'. The
output would be at best mixed, mostly English.

Most implementations of getopt report errors only in English. I just
ported NetBSD getopt to HelenOS after looking at all of them and noticed
that.

So at best, we could expect gettext() to report the few errors that come
from gengetopt generated code itself. This means yet another shared
object dependency ... without much of a payoff since we're limited to
constant English error messages in getopt itself (in most
implementations).

Implementing gettext in gengetopt itself might be worth it, but not in
the generated files.

Cheers,
--Tim

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