Re: Emacs i18n

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

On 3/26/19 9:11 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> 2. While you're thinking about (1) here are some other questions. How
>> will ngettext determine the message catalog? Is the catalog visible to
>> users as a global variable, or as a hidden part of the global state, or
>> is it something explicit? How will catalogs from multiple packages be
>> used? How would a multi-lingual application work in Emacs if the message
>> catalog is part of global state? This seems to be a crucial issue, I'd
>> say. For example, should Emacs export dcngettext to Lisp code, instead
>> of just plain ngettext? (Emacs could then define ngettext in terms of
>> dcngettext.)
> Do we have any reasons not to follow the CLISP example of factoring
> these issues?

That's the first I've heard that CLISP does gettext. I looked into it,
and it's a reasonably simple binding, which means that the language is
part of the global state (Emacs would not easily be multilingual) and
that each package can have its own catalog and can specify that catalog
as a trailing argument to gettext (presumably the default catalog would
be for Emacs core). This should be good enough, though it will be a bit
of a hassle for non-core code to keep track of the catalog.


> will we mandate that Emacs catalogs need
> always to be in UTF-8 encoding?

Yes, that makes sense.