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

[Paul Eggert]

> From: Zack Weinberg <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 11 Jun 2002 12:33:59 -0700
> 
> On Tue, Jun 11, 2002 at 09:18:29PM +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
>
> > 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.

POSIX 1003.1-2001 specifies an NLSPATH environment variable for this
purpose.  POSIX requires only only the catopen family of functions,
but it's natural for the gettext family to use NLSPATH too, and that
is how Solaris gettext(3c) does things.  Shouldn't the GNU gettext
function family support NLSPATH?