Re: gettext: "make check" fails on NetBSD/sparc-1.5

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Bruno Haible <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 22:07:04 +0100 (CET)
> 
> > Bruno, when did that requirement enter Posix?  Is that an official
> > Posix standard or just a draft?
> 
> It is quite old. It is contained in SUSV2 (5 years old) and also in
> the SunOS 4 manual pages (> 10 years old). You find it also in the
> POSIX subsystem of OpenVMS
> http://www-sld.slac.stanford.edu/HELP/POSIX/CALLABLE_FUNCTIONS/PRINTF/DESCRIPTION
> (certainly not very new either :-))

If I understand correctly, these are not standard documents, they are
extensions private to those platforms.

> > How about if gettext will come with a version of printf from glibc,
> > for those systems which don't support %5$s?
> 
> Please not. I don't want to blow up every GNU package that features
> internationalization.

I was talking about doing so in gettext only.  Then people who don't
have this feature in their library will be able to install gettext and
use that for building the other packages.

The issue popped up in conjunction with gettext anyway.

> Just accept the fact that some libc authors
> haven't done their homework w.r.t. standards and that therefore
> gettext output will look garbled on these systems in some rare cases.

Logical-order Arabic and Hebrew will be illegible in those cases.