Re: Introduction to multiarch: What maintainers must do

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Wed, 29 Jul 2009, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:

> > However, you *can* share the same .mo files on each platform, since the
> > gettext code copes with endianness issues at runtime if need be.
> 
> So we would have to define a default endianness for creating such
> files. A patch to gettext to create them allways little endian (or the
> other way) seems in order.
>
> Thoughts from the maintainer?

I have very good news :-) There is already a default for that, as
msgfmt always creates little endian .mo files by default.

In fact, lots of source packages have pre-built .mo files, which are
just copied when doing "make install".

So, as far as we don't try to change msgfmt behaviour, we will not
need to patch it at all.

As noted by Cyril, there is a small discussion about this in Bug#468209.

Thanks.