Re: dpkg i18n and gettext

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Sun, 1 Nov 1998, Ian Jackson wrote:

> Over the next weeks and months I expect to be un-reorganising dpkg's
> build system to look more like the way it used to.  As part of this
> I'm considering dropping gettext in favour of catgets.

Well, I don't know much about catgets but gettext manual says things like
this:

"constructing the message catalogs is a pain".

  "[...] The main problem is the work for the programmer.
Every time he comes to a translatable string he has to define a number
(or a symbolic constant) which has also be defined in the message
catalog file.  He also has to take care for duplicate entries,
duplicate message IDs etc.  If he wants to have the same quality in the
message catalog as the GNU `gettext' program provides he also has to
put the descriptive comments for the strings and the location in all
source code files in the message catalog.  This is nearly a Mission:
Impossible."


Question: Does catgets have also .po files and msgmerge?
If not, I think this would be a bad idea from the translator's point of view.

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