Re: ITP: gettext-base

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Tue, 29 Jun 1999, Julian Gilbey wrote:

> > > No objections from me.  Sounds fine.  As a harder project (of whose
> > > worth I am uncertain): figure out how much more space could be saved
> > > by splitting the catalogs as well.
> > 
> > If the current scheme is well enough for you, please don't think of
> > splitting the catalogs. It will create additional problems on the
> > translators's side.
> 
> No, it won't.  I wouldn't dream of having more than one translation
> file, but there will be a Perl script or similar which will automate
> the splitting of the catalog file.  My idea is to create
> gettext-base.{po,mo} files which contain only those messages needed by
> /usr/bin/gettext itself.  The main gettext.{po,mo} files will continue
> to contain everything.  Should be very easy to implement.  The only
> thing which needs thinking about carefully is how to make sure that
> gettext finds the catalog.  gettextp.c could be modified to read:
> 
>   /* Set the text message domain.  */
>   bindtextdomain (PACKAGE_BASE, LOCALEDIR);
>   textdomain (PACKAGE_BASE);
> 
> and then a configure-time option could select whether to have
> PACKAGE_BASE equal to ${PACKAGE} or equal to "${PACKAGE}-base".  In
> the latter case, both catalogs would be needed in order to make
> gettext and xgettext (say) both work.
> [...]

Well, now that I've already uploaded gettext-base and it has only 70K of
size (which I think is quite reasonable), I must say that applying an ugly
patch to gettext source is not very appealing and I'm not willing to do it
just for fun.

I will repeat: There are more packages in the base system which are much
larger than this. If the upstream author does not like the idea (which I 
agree it would be nice) of including the gettext program into the libc
sources, I would suggest to leave things as they are now.

Thanks.

-- 
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