Pseudo-locales for i18n testing by English speakers

[Asgeir Frimannsson]

----- "Sean Flanigan" <sflaniga at redhat.com> wrote:
> Ulrich Drepper wrote:
> > Sean Flanigan wrote:
> >> Would there be any interest in getting something like this into
> glibc?
> > 
> > Hell, no.  There is no room for testing code in the runtime.  
> 
<snip>
> Is the implementation of "fetch translations from MO files under
> /usr/share/locale/" hard-coded?  If there's already a nice
> programmatic
> hook I could use, even better.  If I could register locale-specific
> overrides of gettext(), I could add any number of dynamically
> generated
> locales.

It is set by bindtextdomain().

Somewhat related, look at a previous discussion relating to Ubuntu's patched glibc for supporting language-packs:
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/libc-alpha/2005-03/msg00105.html

> A gettext() hook could also be used to fetch translations from other
> sources, such as a shared, up-to-date, translation database.  I think
> that has the potential to be useful to a lot of people, not just
> developers and testers.
> 
> It doesn't really make sense to generate thousands of pseudo PO
> files,
> and compile them into static MOs, when all the required data (ie
> English
> text) is available at runtime.
> 
> Let me change my question then.  How would people feel about having a
> hook to override the behaviour of gettext() in a system-wide fashion?

I guess you could experiment with LD_PRELOAD for this. Tim Foster experimented with this a while a go. 
http://blogs.sun.com/timf/entry/how_much_translation_do_you

cheers,
asgeir