Re[4]: Iterating over variable using AC_DEFINE to get HAVE_FOO_varitem (similar to AC_CHECK_HEADERS)

[Konstantin Andreev]

* On 05/18/10 13:18, Steffen Dettmer wrote:
> > > Therefore, any compile-time test that sets a variable HAVE_LINGUA_foo in 
> > > relation to the languages on the compilation machine will most likely be 
> > > out-of-date when you copy the executable but not the translation file to a 
> > > user's machine.  Conversely, a translation language not available at configure 
> > > time might later be written and installed, at which point your executable is 
> > > already hard-coded not to use it.
> >
> > That's true. But ion the above situation IMHO you cannot handle this case. IMHO 
> > you could only add all possible languages and check, if setting the related 
> > locale succeeds. Am I wrong?
>
> I guess an idea is that the application itself shouldn't need to know about the 
> installed locales and the application shouldn't need to have an own preferences 
> dialog, but have some user-global inherited setting. On a modern linux I would 
> expect that the super-GUI has some tool to set that (some `control panel' or 
> so) and/or have a language selection in the login dialog. I could even imagine 
> that the language configuration tool may fetch missing languages from some 
> package repository.
>
> However, if an application really needs to know the available languages, 
> wouldn't there be a way to find out what it installed, for example using 
> readdir(3)?

User always may choose application language by setting environment variables 
LANG, LC_*. Even on application-by-application basis.

| $ env | grep -E '(LANG|LC_)'
| LANG=ru_RU.UTF-8
| $ date
| вторник, 18 мая 2010 г. 15:02:53 MSD
| $ LANG=de_DE date
| Dienstag, 18. Mai 2010, 15:03:02 MSD
| $

Why reimplement this in the application GUI ? But, if extremely required, I 
would also propose to build the list of available languages dynamically, at 
run-time.

Best regards,
--
Konstantin Andreev, software engineer.
Swemel JSC
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