Re: Plurals and ngettext

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

mån 2003-02-24 klockan 14.36 skrev Owen Taylor:
> > > > I just wrote a short piece of text on the problems of plurals:
> > > > http://developer.gnome.org/doc/tutorials/gnome-i18n/developer.html#plurals
> > > > As mentioned there, GNU gettext since version 0.10.38 includes a
> > > > function called ngettext for solving these problems with plurals. It
> > > > would be nice to be able to use that in future versions of GNOME, so
> > > > that we can get plurals right.
> > > > 
> > > > However, as this is a GNU extension, I'm unsure what the level of
> > > > support there is in other gettext implementations, so it looks like a
> > > > portability problem. Opinions?
[...]
> 
> Well, it makes a significant gettext version -- note that as well as not
> being in the traditional implementations of gettext() found on
> currently-common versions of Solaris and so forth,
> it also is only found in reasonably recent versions of GNU gettext and
> glibc.
> 
> (It looks like it was added as of glibc-2.2, don't know the gettext
> version off hand. So, Linux distributions released in the last two
> years or so will have it.)
> 
> But then again, some GNOME software above GTK+ uses 
> bind_textdomain_codeset() without checking, and that is of similar
> vintage...
> 
> The OpenI18N thing is pretty much a red-herring; OpenI18N follows
> Linux practice and is being adapted by Sun, so it isn't _completely_
> irrelevant here, but it certainly isn't a widely adopted standard
> at the moment.

So what are people's opinions? Should this wait another two years?


Christian