Re: ngettext revisited

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Tue, 2003-09-30 at 21:55, Callum McKenzie wrote:
> As a data point: gnome-games started using ngettext in 2.4 (albeit 
> with a sane-ish default for systems without it) and there hasn't been 
> any complaint yet. So we're probably pretty safe doing this.

While I think it is a good idea to move to using ngettext this early in
the process, be careful about assigning too much value to this data
point. All it says is that no early adopter building from source is
using a system where he cannot upgrade to a recent GNU gettext.
Eventually somebody will try to build stuff on an older Solaris box
(Solaris 8.0 needs a patch) or something that we haven't thought of yet
and the bug report will come in. :-)

I've seen this on other packages where you get some really strange
incompatibility bug that seems obvious in retrospective, but the package
has been out for six months or a year by that point.

Again, not an argument against using ngettext, but we will eventually
get bug reports; but the consensus seems to be that requiring GNU
gettext compatibility is not too onerous, so we just need to make that
known.

Cheers,
Malcolm