Re: a question about distribution packaging

[Bruno Haible]

Hi,

Ben Walton wrote:
> I'm hoping that someone can provide an authoritative answer on whether
> or not it is valid to ship $share_dir/locale/$LANG/LC_TIME (or
> LC_NUMERIC, etc) as a symlink pointed at LC_MESSAGES.
> 
> My viewpoint after reading the docs is that the symlink at the
> directory level is not valid.  While it's rare (and somewhat
> discouraged) that a package would deliver a separate .mo file in the
> LC_TIME directory, it is valid for the package to do so.  The
> directory-level symlink would prevent distributing separate .mo files.

I agree with your viewpoint. In a private discussion with Paul Eggert from
2002-01-15 to 2002-01-17, I came to the same conclusion and added the
EXTRA_LOCALE_CATEGORIES to the Makevars file for po/ directories. coreutils
uses this hook as a way of installing a file into
$share_dir/locale/$LANG/LC_TIME since November 2002.

> The alternate viewpoint is that LC_TIME symlinks haven't harmed
> anything in the 6+ years they've been shipped this way, so continuing
> (and expanding) the practice is acceptable.

A package can decide to install different .mo files in
  $share_dir/locale/$LANG/LC_MESSAGES/domain.mo
  $share_dir/locale/$LANG/LC_TIME/domain.mo

The gettext Makefile infrastructure currently does not support this
situation (it only supports installing the same .mo file as
  $share_dir/locale/$LANG/LC_MESSAGES/domain.mo
  $share_dir/locale/$LANG/LC_TIME/domain.mo)
but packages could get into this situation if they use their own Makefiles.

A single package that puts a symlink from LC_TIME to LC_MESSAGES breaks all
other packages that want to use this approach. Therefore it is not a good
idea to put this symlink.

Bruno