Re: [help-gengetopt] Feature requests: gettext

[Tim Post]

On Tue, 2008-09-16 at 10:32 +0200, Lorenzo Bettini wrote:

> I hope that gettext functionalities will be added to getopt 
> implementation soon, at least in glibc...

I doubt it, and here's why:

Getopt is a corner case in userspace libc as far as internationalization
goes, almost everything uses it. If someone wanted to put program 'foo'
on an initrd for instance, they'd either have to statically link against
gettext or make room for another dso depending on how many things used
it. Then there's the dictionaries, etc.

Busybox is a good example.

If I use .. say .. libxml, I know that I have a dependency on something
beyond libc(x). Parsing command line options should not create such a
dependency. 

I'd be all for a separate getopt_intl implementation though. Not only
would it help users, it would make producing locale specific manuals a
cinch with something like help2man. That should probably be based on gnu
getopt, since gnu getopt has more perks than most and is by far the
noisiest in its internal error reporting.

Cheers,
--Tim