Re: NLS support

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

We removed the --disable-nls option because conditionally present API
is basically a bad idea; everyone that wants translation has to
have conditionals in their program, and has to code around the absence
if it isn't there.

The main reason --disable-nls was present before was that on some
systems there was no reasonable gettext to use with non-GPL
programs. Since GNU gettext is now LGPL, there is no reason people
can't just install it.

If you don't want message catalogs installed, simply set the LINGUAS
environment variable to "", and no message catalogs will be
installed. This will solve the "100 MB" problem.

(You might actually want to set it to something like "C en_US", since
one technique to use if two source strings collide in English is to
use something artifical for the key and have translations in place all
the time.)

Regards,
                                        Owen

Ali Akcaagac <ali akcaagac stud fh-wilhelmshaven de> writes:

> hello,
> 
> please allow me to ask the reason why there is no --disable-nls
> feature in the configure scripts?
> 
> well i came up with this question in #gnome, #gtk+, #galeon and on
> another network (efnet) well not only this question also some serious
> discussions has been made.
> 
> some people say, that gtk and gnome wont support --disable-nls, another
> couple of people say that glib-gettext.m4 is broken and another one say
> that it may be supported and finally it end up with this email on this
> development list.
> 
> - please let me inform you that there are a lot of people out that dont
>   want and dont like nls support on their systems because of the waste
>   of diskspace. we are not talking about some minor kilobytes here. we
>   are talking about nearly 100 MB (on my system).
> 
> - the need of gettext beeing installed
> - and in most situations the text embedded in the code itself is english
>   already, there is no need to export any languages.
> 
> i know you might come up with the solution (i heard this several times)
> to remove all unneeded locales after installation etc. but the point is
> not to work around things. the point is howto avoid things.
> 
> could someone state a reply to this please? i think you must have a
> serious reason for disabling --disable-nls.
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