Re: Bug#114461: gettext: there is no way to control where message catalogs are found at run time (fwd)

[Bruno Haible]

Zack Weinberg wrote:
> Unlike all other aspects of locale information, message catalogs are
> found only in the location compiled into the binary.  Environment
> variables such as LOCPATH do not affect the search.
> 
> The gettext command honors a TEXTDOMAINDIR environment variable, but
> nothing else does.  It would be best, in my opinion, if LOCPATH worked
> as it does for other locale information.

It is for practical reasons: Most people rarely install locales, but
sometimes install new packages. They would tend to set the LOCPATH
environment variables to include all the directories where they have
installed packages, like /usr/local, /opt/kde, etc. Since LOCPATH
applies affects the startup time of all programs, in would quite
significantly affect the performance of the system. For these reasons,
it's better to keep LOCPATH and TEXTDOMAINDIR separate.

Bruno