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Date:      Tue, 12 Mar 2002 15:09:42 +0000 (UTC)
From:      naddy@mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber)
To:        freebsd-ports@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: gettext vs gettext-devel
Message-ID:  <a6l5nm$2fh1$1@kemoauc.mips.inka.de>
References:  <20020310034141.GA16921@wwweasel.geeksrus.net> <1015751079.509.9.camel@notebook>

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Maxim Sobolev <sobomax@FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> It is incorrect assertion - the ports in fact don't smash each others
> files. ports/devel/gettext-devel/pkg-plist is a stub, the real plist is
> generated on the fly. Check ports/devel/gettext-devel/Makefile for
> details.

Now that I have installed both ports, I see that gettext-devel only
installs a set of *-new commands and no library at all.  This
suggests that programs that truly require a new libintl (i.e.
ngettext() ) aren't supported at all.  Am I missing something?

> No, we can't use only one, because some ports only work with older one,
> while some only with newer one, therefore we need both to make everyone
> happy.

What are the problems?

OpenBSD completely moved to gettext-0.10.40.  If I recall the
experience correctly, there were no API issues, only some invalid
message catalogs:

1. Since the new gettext supports transcoding of messages to the
   current locale/desired character set, it requires that message
   catalogs specify a valid encoding.  For old gettext that value
   was a dummy.  This is usually trivial to fix.

2. Interpretation of the backslash character changed. In multibyte
   encodings, backslashes need to be escaped (or the escape removed,
   I forgot).  This mostly trips up a particular Chinese encoding.
   Again, the offensive message catalogs are trivial to fix.

3. The new gettext requires multibyte-encoded message catalogs to
   be well-formed.  In particular, a byte missing from what should
   be a double-byte character is a fatal error.  There are some
   broken message catalogs that violate their multibye-encoding.
   The breakage itself is independent of the gettext version, the
   old gettext merely doesn't notice.  Fixing the message catalogs
   isn't difficult, but it may require to complete missing characters,
   so a speaker of the respective language (Chinese, Japanese, or
   Korean) needs to help out.  We may also be able to steal patches
   from OpenBSD or, I guess, Debian.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de


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