Re: address@hidden: Bug#113988: makeinfo: locale settings should not influence output files]

[Josip Rodin]

On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 11:20:15AM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > A generated document's contents shouldn't be influenced by the
> > environment of the generator program, otherwise weird mixtures of
> > languages might happen.
> 
> These two goals contradict: if LC_MESSAGES is set to something, the
> locale-sensitive functions will use that language; switching to the
> document language for text output into the generated document is
> either impossible or very hard.

If they contradict, that can only be because the programmer(s) who coded
this i18n/l10n stuff did it in a wrong manner. A program's interface and
a program's output are two quite distinct things IMHO.

I wouldn't expect a fdisk that displays its messages in e.g. French to
translate the strings in the partition table to French, or anything like
that. With documents like the ones makeinfo creates there is more of a
possibility that the user does actually want the messages in the files to be
localized, but I think that the number of documents that get broken would be
high enough to warrant the change.

Having a command line option to enable localization of documents' contents
would be a much safer way to handle this and prevent the problems.

-- 
     2. That which causes joy or happiness.