Re: Solaris 8, gettext

[Igor Brezac]

On Wed, 24 Apr 2002, Bruno Haible wrote:

> Igor Brezac writes:
>
> > I am trying to build gettext-0.11.1 on Solaris 8 with the native iconv().
> > I developed iconv_open_wrapper() (see below) based on charset.alias and
> > this combination seems to work.
> > ...
> > GNU libiconv may
> > be a away to approach the problem, but the native iconv seem adequate.
>
> It is a nice idea. But it doesn't address the main point: the
> reliability of the iconv converters.
>
> If the gettext tools are used with Solaris/Irix/HP-UX/OSF1/... iconv,
> I wouldn't want to receive bug reports about core dumps or weird
> behaviour that it causes. The PO files that are manipulated by gettext
> are simply too much worth to be at the mercy of broken iconvs.
>
> Nothing against Solaris - their iconv is probably the best among the
> non-free ones. Still, if they don't put enough resources on making the
> MIME names such as "ISO-8859-1" work and make iconv_open("UTF-8","UTF-8")
> work, I don't trust that they will make the converters more reliable
> than those that I've seen in Solaris 2.6.
>
> > However, I am not completely satisified with this solution because the
> > code is included in too many places (quick and dirty solution).  Perhaps
> > libintl can provide this function.
>
> Recognizing standard names for iconv_open should be done by iconv_open
> itself, not by a wrapper around it.
>

I have chosen to use GNU iconv because of the reliability issue noted
above and because the performance difference between GNU vs libc iconv
built binaries is negligible.

I do have one request for the gettext library.  Most of the functions in
GNU libintl are defined in libc (solaris in my case) as well.  This
presents a problem if libc is loaded before libintl; in this case the
solaris runtime linker will use *gettext from libc.  The GNU iconv library
solves this problem by prepending 'lib' in front of all global symbols.
#define icon_open libiconv_open

Any thoughts?

-Igor