Re: Bug#192074: gettext: hardcoded ISO 639 list out of date (fwd)

[Bruno Haible]

Alastair McKinstry wrote:

> The language code list in gettext-0.11.5 is out of date

It is up to date w.r.t. its needs. gettext is made for languages for
which some translators are willing to spend energy. This is, up to
now, the case only for the languages which have a two-letter ISO-639
code, plus Luganda.

> Could you either:
>       - update the hard-coded list

I do this when necessary. It is not necessary now.

>       - get gettext to generate the list on build-time from iso-codes
>       - read the list at run-time from iso-codes (if its present)

Relying on iso-codes is not appropriate for gettext because

   * most of the size of iso-codes is spent in translations of
     language/country/county(!)/currency names to various languages,
     which is useless for gettext,

   * iso-codes itself has some bugs:
     - typos like "Noth Ndebele" (should be "North Ndebele"),
     - wrong language names (people using locale pt_BR speak "Brazilian"
       or "Brazilian Portguese", not "Portuguese"),
     - mistakes in translations (like wrong German translation for
       the language name Faroese),
     - missing translations (like the German translation of the
       French département "Vosges").

Bruno