gawk: use of HAVE_LC_MESSAGES

[Bruno Haible]

Hello Arnold,

GNU gettext has in its test suite a test that checks whether gawk's
internationalization is working fine (file gettext-tools/tests/lang-gawk).
It uses a simple program like this:

============================================================================
BEGIN {
  TEXTDOMAIN = "prog"
  bindtextdomain ("./")

  print _"'Your command, please?', asked the waiter."

  printf dcngettext ("a piece of cake", "%d pieces of cake", n) "\n", n

  printf _"%s is replaced by %s." "\n", "FF", "EUR"
}
============================================================================

Ralf Menzel reports a failure of this test on Solaris 9 with gawk 3.1.5,
see http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-utils/2006-11/msg00140.html

It appears that _ produces localized output but dcngettext doesn't. Ralf
has completed the analysis:

  I fetched gawk-stable from savannah and compiled it. 
  Unfortunately, the failure remained. I then started to try to
  understand what might be happening.

  In builtin.c there is a function do_dcngettext that is responsible for
  calling dcngettext. But when either of the preprocessor macros
  ENABLE_NLS, HAVE_LC_MESSAGES, or HAVE_DCGETTEXT is not true, it
  instead contains a very simple replacement for dcngettext. I found the
  on my computer HAVE_LC_MESSAGES is not set. (It's not mentioned in
  config.h or even in configh.in.) After some experimentation I arrived
  at the following patch that shows the problem:

  --- snip ---
  diff -u -p -r1.2 configure.ac
  --- gawk-stable/configure.ac    11 Aug 2006 12:49:40 -0000      1.2
  +++ gawk-stable/configure.ac    28 Nov 2006 17:48:43 -0000
  @@ -140,6 +140,7 @@ esac
   dnl initialize GNU gettext
   AM_GNU_GETTEXT([external])
   AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION([0.14.4])
  +gt_LC_MESSAGES
   
   dnl checks for header files
   AC_HEADER_STDC
  --- snip ---

  With this patch I could build a version of awk that passes the 
  lang-gawk test of gettext-0.16.

While this patch fixes the problem for Solaris, which has LC_MESSAGES, it
will not do so for mingw, which doesn't have LC_MESSAGES. On such platforms,
it's <libintl.h> from GNU gettext (included from gettext.h, included from
awk.h) which will define LC_MESSAGES. But HAVE_LC_MESSAGES will not be defined
on such a platform. So what I propose instead of Ralf's patch is this one:


--- builtin.c   11 Aug 2006 12:49:39 -0000      1.2
+++ builtin.c   28 Nov 2006 20:42:03 -0000
@@ -3014,7 +3014,7 @@
 
 /* do_dcgettext, do_dcngettext --- handle i18n translations */
 
-#if ENABLE_NLS && HAVE_LC_MESSAGES && HAVE_DCGETTEXT
+#if ENABLE_NLS && defined LC_MESSAGES && HAVE_DCGETTEXT
 
 static int
 localecategory_from_argument(NODE *tree)


This enables the localecategory_from_argument function also for platforms
like mingw.

Bruno