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

[Zack Weinberg]

On Tue, Jun 11, 2002 at 09:18:29PM +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
> 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.

Okay, but then TEXTDOMAINDIR should be honored by all libgettext-using
programs, not just the gettext command.  Right now, there is *no way*
to override the compiled-in path in most libgettext-using programs.

zw