perror, gettext, question marks

[Markus Kuhn]

Bruno Haible wrote on 2000-12-04 17:59 UTC:
>   b) perror, via gettext, does something outside of the scope of ISO C:
>      It looks at the value of LANGUAGE. This is a GNU extension, fine.
>      But the GNU extension is badly implemented, because it leads to
>      unpleasant error messages when neither the user nor the program
>      has done something incorrect. So let's fix the GNU extension.

What was the original justification for this GNU extension? What really
important and essential functionality does LANGUAGE provide that LANG/
LC_MESSAGES/LC_ALL do not already provide? If we really need LANGUAGE,
shouldn't it be added to POSIX as well?

To be honest, I get sometimes rather scared by the quite significant
number of little-known non-standard environment variables that glibc
interprets. This can easily lead to bad surprises for application
programmers, especially as far as security is concerned. If there is a
reasonable way to minimize the number of GNU-proprietary environment
variables that control the behaviour of applications, then let's prefer
that. Blind feature-fetish as opposed to simplicity and predictability
is what gave M$-Windows its bad reputation after all. The locale stuff
is already complicated enough without GNU extensions.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: < http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ >