Re: Plurals and ngettext

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sun, Feb 23, 2003 at 04:30:50PM +0100, Christian Rose wrote:
> 
> Noone has given any objections yet -- rather the opposite, as people
> have confirmed that this is supported by the OpenI18N standard and
> compliant platforms. That still leaves the issue of older systems, but
> then people that are worried about portability problems should come
> forward. That's basically the reason I asked this on desktop-devel to
> begin with, to get possible objections on the portability issue. So far
> there has been none.

Openi18n is a brand new standard, it doesn't yet have any real-world
portability meaning.  Portability isn't a "any objections?" topic,
it's just a given that stuff must be portable. Right now you can AFAIK
build GLib with system gettext instead of GNU gettext. If you can only
do that on Solaris then Kenneth says we're fine since Solaris has
ngettext, at least recent Solaris. But I don't *know* that we
currently rely on GNU gettext on all other platforms. Do you know that
for sure?  If not, we should ask Owen or someone else who probably
knows. If we're increasing the set of people who must use GNU gettext
we need to be sure we understand the impact of that.

I'm not saying I know there's a problem here. I'm saying that you said
you didn't know, and no one has said they *did* know. Until someone
says they definitely know the whole situation including *BSD, HPUX,
etc., we should not commit any ngettext() usage because we have no
plan and don't understand the issues.

Havoc