Re: Setting locale for document string translation with libintl-perl

[Gavin Smith]

On Sat, Nov 28, 2020 at 11:10:15PM +0000, Gavin Smith wrote:
> I'm trying to upgrade the bundled libintl-perl to version 1.32 for
> texi2any but am hitting a problem.  It's due to a fix for this bug:
> 
> https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=81315
> 
> The result is that after upgrading the library, there are test
> failures due to untranslated strings.  The problem is that the
> tests run under the C locale for consistent results but that
> strings won't be translated if the locale is C.  LC_MESSAGES or
> LC_ALL need to be set for the translation.
> 
> However, I'm not sure what to set LC_MESSAGES to, because the same
> locales won't exist on all systems.  The following fixes the tests
> (for example "perl -w t/languages.t simple"):
> 
> diff --git a/tp/Texinfo/Report.pm b/tp/Texinfo/Report.pm
> index 19a207238..04185eeec 100644
> --- a/tp/Texinfo/Report.pm
> +++ b/tp/Texinfo/Report.pm
> @@ -232,6 +232,8 @@ sub _encode_i18n_string($$)
>    return Encode::decode($encoding, $string);
>  }
>  
> +use POSIX qw(setlocale LC_MESSAGES);
> +
>  # Get document translation - handle translations of in-document strings.
>  # Return a parsed Texinfo tree
>  sub gdt($$;$$)
> @@ -244,6 +246,7 @@ sub gdt($$;$$)
>    my $saved_env_LC_ALL = $ENV{'LC_ALL'};
>    my $saved_LANGUAGE = $ENV{'LANGUAGE'};
>  
> +  setlocale(LC_MESSAGES, 'en_GB.utf8');
>    Locale::Messages::textdomain($strings_textdomain);
>  
>    # FIXME do that only once when encoding is seen (or at beginning)
> 
> but obviously this is not right because not everybody with have
> the en_GB.utf8 locale.  Changing it to en_US.utf8 still works, although
> I don't think I have that locale installed (it's not listed in the output of
> "locale -a").  Other attempts like fr_FR.utf8 or en_XX.utf8 lead to failure.

I still don't have a better idea other than to use a list of locales
to try so that if any developer has trouble with the test suite
(mainly the t/languages.t test) their locale can be added to the list.