Re: texinfo-7.2.90 on OpenBSD

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > as explained in [1].
> 
> So the problem is that, unless the locale is pushed into the
> environment, libintl cannot be sure to know about the modified locale?

Unless the locale name is pushed into the environment, libintl cannot
do its job properly.

> If so, I understand why setenv must be used to push the locale into
> the environment when the program uses libintl.  But I still don't
> understand why after doing so, programs must call
> setlocale (LC_ALL, "") and not setlocale (LC_ALL, the-new-locale) --
> shouldn't that be equivalent?

Both should be equivalent, yes.

The GNU gettext manual [2] suggests to use setlocale (LC_ALL, "")
for two reasons:

  1) Most programs should take their locale from the environment.
     Hardly any program should invoke setenv ("LC_ALL", some_locale, 1);
     maybe 'makeinfo' is one of the few programs that needs this.

  2) If we suggested to use
       setenv ("LC_ALL", some_locale, 1);
       setlocale (LC_ALL, some_locale);
     the question would immediately come up "what if these two some_locale
     arguments are not the same?" But we don't want complicated narratives
     at this point.

> And since the Windows setlocale ignores
> the environment, the latter is actually preferable (at least on
> Windows)?

At most in Emacs on Windows, because Emacs on Windows does things specially.

In all other packages, the <libintl.h> file that is needed for invoking
bindtextdomain and textdomain also includes a setlocale() override that
solves the issue, similar to what Gnulib does [3].

Bruno

[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Triggering.html
[3] https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/setlocale.html