Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 18:13:35 +0200 (EET) From: Maxim Sobolev <sobomax@FreeBSD.ORG> To: naddy@mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber) Cc: freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: gettext vs gettext-devel Message-ID: <200203121613.g2CGDZT84534@vega.vega.com> In-Reply-To: <no.id> from "Christian Weisgerber" at Mar 12, 2002 03:09:42 PM
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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? Yes, they don't, but AFAIK there is no such packages in the tree at all. > > > 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. This is true, but do you really understand the size of the problem? Some time ago, when gettext-0.10.40 was just released, I've tried to convert GNOME ports to use it, but failed miserably because of the excessive amount of patching required. OpenBSD's ports collection is much smaller than ours, and amount of GUI ports (primary users of gettext) is much lower, therefore they had much smaller problem in their hands. However, if you would submit a patch that will convert all of gnome-fifth-toe to gettext-0.10.40, I'll be glad to commit it. -Maxim To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-ports" in the body of the message
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