Talk:Gettext

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This page seems to be only about GNU gettext, but has a generic gettext title. It should at least mention that gettext originated at Sun, and is still used by Sun's software and OS. The portable environment variable is named LANG, not LANGUAGE, the latter being a GNU extension with certain additional features.

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[edit] LANG and LANGUAGE?

What is the difference between LANG and LANGUAGE? This is not defined in the gettext manual http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_mono/gettext.html

The proper variable which refers to translation only is neither but LC_MESSAGES. LANG is a very generic (mostly historic despite being most known) variable which affects also the character set, the date format and others. This is especially problematic as LANG often unnecessarily implies something inferior to UTF-8. --82.141.49.90 16:49, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
Replying to an old comment for clarity's sake. Here's what the ABOUT-NLS file (distributed with gettext) says:

Not all programs have translations for all languages. By default, an English message is shown in place of a nonexistent translation. If you understand other languages, you can set up a priority list of languages. This is done through a different environment variable, called `LANGUAGE'. GNU `gettext' gives preference to `LANGUAGE' over `LANG' for the purpose of message handling, but you still need to have `LANG' set to the primary language; this is required by other parts of the system libraries. For example, some Swedish users who would rather read translations in German than English for when Swedish is not available, set `LANGUAGE' to `sv:de' while leaving `LANG' to `sv_SE'.

80.233.255.7 23:58, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Thread safe

It reads on this article that gettext isn't thread safe! But it is locales that aren't thread safe! I'm removing the whole sentence. 80.244.73.230 22:47, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] MIME

Is there any MIME type for .po files? I have seen text/x-po used, but I want to know if there is anything (semi-)official.

[edit] PO

Some articles link to this one for a discription of PO = portable object, but PO is not mentioned here. Maybe it should be. --LA2 (talk) 02:18, 7 January 2008 (UTC)