Abdelrazak Younes wrote:
Georg Baum wrote:
Abdelrazak Younes wrote:
This last line in particular looks suspicious. Why do we set environment
variable at each translation request?
Because the environment variable determines what language gettext will
use,
and we don't know what other message was translated before. To my
knowledge
no library call of gettext exists that takes the language as a function
argument rather than an environment variable.
[...]
Unless you really want to spend a lot of time yo learn all aspects about
gettext I suggest that you leave this alone.
OK, thanks for the explanation. I am not pretending that I will solve
everything, don't be afraid ;-). We do have an internal in source
gettext. Couldn't we just support that and live all other version aside?
Maybe this would simplify the code a bit, dunno.
One other thing that may be changed also is the way we load po files. It
seems that there is some caching done inside gettext but it is disabled
as soon as we change the po file. This is explained here:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_mono/gettext.html#SEC152
Maybe there's something wrong in the way we load the po files? Just
asking to you knowledgeable people...
At this link they say something interesting WRT changing language:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_mono/gettext.html#SEC155
I don't see any use of this '_nl_msg_cat_cntr' variable in the code.
Maybe that's a solution. Did you tried that in the past?
10.5 Being a gettext grok
To fully exploit the functionality of the GNU gettext library it is
surely helpful to read the source code. But for those who don't want to
spend that much time in reading the (sometimes complicated) code here is
a list comments:
* Changing the language at runtime
For interactive programs it might be useful to offer a selection
of the used language at runtime. To understand how to do this one need
to know how the used language is determined while executing the gettext
function. The method which is presented here only works correctly with
the GNU implementation of the gettext functions.
In the function dcgettext at every call the current setting of
the highest priority environment variable is determined and used.
Highest priority means here the following list with decreasing priority:
1. LANGUAGE
2. LC_ALL
3. LC_xxx, according to selected locale
4. LANG
Afterwards the path is constructed using the found value and the
translation file is loaded if available.
What is now when the value for, say, LANGUAGE changes. According
to the process explained above the new value of this variable is found
as soon as the dcgettext function is called. But this also means the
(perhaps) different message catalog file is loaded. In other words: the
used language is changed.
But there is one little hook. The code for gcc-2.7.0 and up provides
some optimization. This optimization normally prevents the calling of
the dcgettext function as long as no new catalog is loaded. But if
dcgettext is not called the program also cannot find the LANGUAGE
variable be changed (see section 10.2.7 Optimization of the *gettext
functions). A solution for this is very easy. Include the following code
in the language switching function.
/* Change language. */
setenv ("LANGUAGE", "fr", 1);
/* Make change known. */
{
extern int _nl_msg_cat_cntr;
++_nl_msg_cat_cntr;
}
Abdel.
