Re: [Translation-i18n] How to determine if a message catalog exist?

[martin@v.loewis.de (M. v. Loewis)]

all...@at... (Allan Wind) writes:

> Does setlocale support the "de_AT:de" notation?  

I don't think so. setlocale also does not consider LANGUAGE.

> It is not documented in the man page.  And by extension, does
> gettext do the right thing with such a locale?

gettext directly looks at LANGUAGE, which overrides any locale
settings. If you want to instruct it programmatically, you need to
invoke setenv; see the gettext manual for details.

> I hope "rainbow of different messages" was not perceived negatively,
> just thinking of the language setting that I use "en:da:de:fr" which
> surely would look strange.

This is, indeed, a common critique about the LANGUAGE feature -
especially since the gettext documentation brings up the example of
sv:de, where a Swedish user might prefer German messages over English
ones. It is indeed debatable whether users would ever want to do that;
my canonical example for the feature is hence de_AT:de, which I
consider more reasonable.

Regards,
Martin