Re: address@hidden: Bug#113988: makeinfo: locale settings should not influence output files]

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Tue, 16 Oct 2001, Josip Rodin wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 11:20:15AM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > > A generated document's contents shouldn't be influenced by the
> > > environment of the generator program, otherwise weird mixtures of
> > > languages might happen.
> > 
> > These two goals contradict: if LC_MESSAGES is set to something, the
> > locale-sensitive functions will use that language; switching to the
> > document language for text output into the generated document is
> > either impossible or very hard.
> 
> If they contradict, that can only be because the programmer(s) who coded
> this i18n/l10n stuff did it in a wrong manner. A program's interface and
> a program's output are two quite distinct things IMHO.

This means in practice that locales and gettext machinery cannot be
used for producing non-English text for anything but the messages
printed when makeinfo runs.  That is, we need to write our own
versions of functions like strcoll, and either find some way to have
gettext handle more than a single language at a time, or write a
replacement for gettext features for those few places in the program
which put localized strings into the generated file.

> Having a command line option to enable localization of documents' contents
> would be a much safer way to handle this and prevent the problems.

I don't see how does this solve anything: when the option enables
localization, the question how to do that still remains.