Re: i18n

[Bruno H. <br...@cl...>]

Sam wrote:
> BTW, could you please explain this comment:
>
> /* Given the above, the following line is only needed for those platforms
> for which gettext is compiled with HAVE_LOCALE_NULL defined. */

On glibc systems, setlocale(cat,NULL) is known to return a locale string in the
expected format, and locales can be created by users. Therefore gettext()
uses setlocale(); on the other platforms gettext() relies on the environment
variables and the setlocale() call is therefore actually redundant.

> also, could you please confirm that this is necessary:
>
> /* Invalidate the gettext internal caches. */
> textdomain(textdomain(NULL));

textdomain(textdomain(NULL)) has the effect of incrementing the (hidden)
variable _nl_msg_cat_cntr. gettext has a cache that stores translations,
indexed by (domain, category) pairs. This cache is invalidated when 
_nl_msg_cat_cntr is incremented. This is necessary when the encoding
has changed.

> >> setlocale(5, "fr_FR")                            = NULL
> > This explains it.
> 
> what's inexplicable is that the error is silently ignored.

The error is silently ignored because the return value of setlocale() is ignored.

> >> Apparently because "locale -a" does not list fr_FR.
> >
> > But it will likely have the locale "fr_FR.UTF-8" (or "fr_FR.utf8"
> > which is the name under which it is stored on disk)?
> 
> no, all I have is C, POSIX and a bunch of en_* locales (I am an
> English-only bigot, remember? ;-)

OK, then my proposed code would not help on your system. But some
Linux distros are now shipping only *.UTF-8 locales, no fr_FR locale
any more.

> so when called during startup it will be a warning, not an error.
> My point is that ignoring errors is always wrong.
> If setting locale fails, the user should be notified about it

OK, fine with me.

> At any rate, apparently you do not object to moving init_language past
> initmem and letting it indicate a failure as long as it does not prevent
> clisp from starting up.

I'm not sure there aren't GETTEXT or GETTEXTL calls during initmem
or the rest of the start-up. If there are some, it seems safer to me to
  - continue to call init_language as early as it is now,
  - but store its result or success in some variable, and
  - emit the warning message after everything is initialized.

> Now, what _is_ a failure?
> 
> 1. setlocale --> NULL

Yes, this is a failure. It means the system does not support translations in the
specified locale.

> 2. textdomain --> NULL ==> errno

Indicates a malloc failure.

> 3. bindtextdomain --> NULL ==> errno

Likewise.

> 4. bind_textdomain_codeset --> errno != 0 (may return NULL on success!)

This function can fail if malloc fails. I'm not aware that it could return NULL on success.

Bruno