On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 07:59:45AM +0100, Daniel Stenberg wrote:
> I'm not very experienced in gettext and i18n issues in general, so I hope for
> some guidelines from cluefull people. gettext is a GNU program so we must make
> sure there's no license issues around our possible use of it.

The licensing issue is dealt with at
http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/gettext_164.html
In short: GNU libintl is under the LGPL, but using the GNU text extraction
and maintenance utilities isn't considered to have any licensing restrictions.

In my experience, marking up the internationalizable (is that a
word?) text in libcurl (and curl) is pretty easy, but getting libintl
to work over several versions of autotools is tricky.

I think it's a great idea to at least put the i18n hooks into libcurl
so those who want a non-English version of their custom application can
do so without rebuildling libcurl. Probably all you'd really need to
do for that is define the N_ macro and add some N_ tags around the text
in libcurl, then add the language catalog compilation to the makefile.
The "hard part" of lookup up strings and translating them can be left up
to the application so libcurl doesn't become bloated with these kinds
of things that aren't needed by everyone.

Of course, 'curl' is one such application. Rather than shipping GNU
libintl along with curl (which is how many GNU licensed applications do
it), you could just link curl with the system libintl at build time.
I'm not sure to what degree the GNU i18n API has been standardized,
but I think this could also work on Solaris, not just Linux.

>>> Dan

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