tlug: Li18nux Draft Spec?!?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Austin" == Austin Kurahone <austin@example.com> writes:

    Austin> I've been giving the new Li18nux spec a quick glance
    Austin> through and was wondering what everyone else here thought
    Austin> about it.  To be specific, I'm currious why it chooses GNU
    Austin> gettext (well it currently has all this SunOS stuff in it,
    Austin> but they say they're going to be moving to gnu gettext) as
    Austin> their mandetory(?)  mechanism for message catalogues.  Am
    Austin> I the only one who sees a problem with this[1]?

Unfortunately, catgets() sucks, and that's a fact.  There's no real
alternative to gettext for free software; it's just too hard to
maintain catgets catalogs to get volunteers to do it or the developers
to update the program with catgets calls.

gettext() has its weaknesses, but they're present in catgets too,
mostly.  Including collisions (if you and I both check out the catgets
catalog, and add message #314159, CVS will not pick it up, you need to
write separate administrative scripts to handle it).

gettext's strengths are (1) reuse of already translated messages, and
(2) calls to message outputting functions are self-documenting, you
don't need to add a comment saying that /* message #27178 == "people
always forget to update these comments, don't ya know?" */

    Austin> Since you can't just say "aw hell GPL it" (Apache comes to
    Austin> mind), and the GPL and hance gettext have the wonderful
    Austin> "VIRAL" clause with these programs remain noncompliant?

If it's a true MIT/BSD license, then you can very well GPL it.  So
there.  You have to maintain two versions, that's all.  Or you can
write a BSD implementation of gettext; it shouldn't be too hard,
although I suspect the BSD folk probably use 

Write proper glue code and localize it to a single module, and it
should be feasible.

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