Re: localename: Fix gettext test failures on mingw

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Eli,

> I think it's important to share my experience here, ...
> The problems I describe are not theoretical, I actually bumped into
> them when porting Guile 2.0.x.

Ah, I wasn't aware that you were describing a problem. What was the
problem that you encountered with Guile? You say:

> It defines symbols based on LC_MESSAGES and exposes them
> to Scheme.

What was the problem with that? Since guile is based on the
platform's runtime + gnulib, not the platform's runtime alone,
what issue actually arose?

> There were also other issues.  One of them, AFAIR, was that
> LC_MESSAGES was defined to a large arbitrary value, but LC_MAX was not
> updated to cover that

LC_MAX is not a macro that should be visible to Guile users, since it
is platform-dependent.

> Instead, applications that
> need these facilities should adapt according to their needs by using
> the Windows native facilities.

There is and will always be a debate whether a language implementation
(like Guile, but the same applies to C and CLISP) should tend to offer
APIs closer to the platform's particularities or closer to platform-
independent standards like POSIX. As you can see, my opinion is on the
"closer to platform-independent standards" side.

Bruno