Re: language support

[Ronen Tzur <rtzur@shani.net>]

Hi Dan,

The related info pages for glibc mention that the "catgets" family of 
functions are defined by an X/Open standard, and that is the only standard 
for translation.  GNU gettext is not standard-compliant, but it is compatible 
with Sun's gettext (which isn't standard-compliant either).  You could say 
both are a de-facto standard, which is good enough.

Maybe my info pages are out-of-date, so take this with a grain of salt.


About standards, that's something you put in paper for all to see and 
implement, rather than something you code -- thus licenses are irrelevant.
Consider XFree for example:  an implementation of The Open Group's X11 
standard, and licensed under the MIT license.


Ronen


On Tuesday 19 March 2002 18:10, hursh wrote:
> I was just curious.  Is gettext compliant with some standard or is it
> standard as in being the GNU standard?  (I remember once being told the
> readline was "standard" and being that readline was(is?) GPL, it implied
> that only GPL code could be "standard".)  I'm curious if there is a
> published standard way of handling multi-language support.
>
> Dan
>
> ---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
> From: Daniel Burrows <dburrows@brown.edu>
> Reply-To: xarchon-l@seul.org
> Date:  Tue, 19 Mar 2002 12:18:51 -0500
>
> >  I should point out that GNU gettext also has the advantage of being
> >standard and well-known, so there are many tools out there to help
> >generate translations, and people who work on translating free software
> >know how to deal with it.
> >
> >  Daniel
> >
> >--
> >/-------------------- Daniel Burrows <dburrows@brown.edu>
> > --------------------\
> >
> >|   "In the old days of analog sound, if you turned the volume up too
> >| high,   | everything started to sound like Bob Dylan."                  
> >|           |
> >
> >\------- (if (not (understand-this)) (go-to http://www.schemers.org))
> > --------/