Re: Re: libintl: stubs or working functions

[Felix Janda <felix.janda@posteo.de>]

On Thu, Apr 16, 2015, Rich Felker wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 07:15:51PM +0200, Felix Janda wrote:
> > As I understand applications need to pass 'need-formatstring-macros' to
> > the AM_GNU_GETTEXT macro to request this functionality. But with debian
> > code search I couldn't find any program doing that...
> 
> OK. AFAIK it's only GNU software like coreutils using this
> functionality.
> 
> > The macro distinguishes three gettext apis. gt_api_version is 1 for the
> > basic version. For the ngettext functions gt_api_version>=2 is necessary
> > and for these "SYSDEP strings" gt_api_version>=3 is necessary.
> > 
> > As I understand musl has gt_api_version=2. Is that right?
> 
> Based on your understanding of the versions, yes, that sounds right.
> 
> > To test for the api version AM_GNU_GETTEXT checks in all cases for
> > bindtextdomain, gettext, _nl_msg_cat_cntr and _nl_domain_bindings. For
> > gt_api_version>=2 it checks for ngettext and for gt_api_version>=3 it
> > does something with __GNU_GETTEXT_SUPPORTED_REVISION we won't need to
> > care about.
> > 
> > So for musl the test gives obviously the wrong result.
> > 
> > I guess that we don't want to export symbols _nl_*.
> > 
> > What I would now like to ask upstream is to put the _nl_* stuff behind
> > an #ifdef __GLIBC__ ...
> 
> I think we should ask why they're doing it. It sounds to me like they
> should just be checking for the APIs they want to use.

Thanks for your advice.

I've sent something [1] to their mailing list a while ago but got no
reply so far.

It might be difficult to find a cross-compile friendly test for the API.

Felix

[1]: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gettext/2015-04/msg00002.html