Although Emacs uses some Gnulib modules, it doesn't use translations or
the gettext function so it won't use the "gnulib" translation domain.
Also, Emacs developers prefer using less Gnulib code when possible.
With that in mind, I see that some recent changes would add
m4/gnulib-i18n.m4 and m4/build-to-host.m4 to Emacs if I naively use
Emacs's admin/merge-gnulib script. Presumably this is because some Emacs
auxiliary programs (not Emacs itself) use Gnulib's regex module, which
now depends on the new gnulib-i18n module. These auxiliary programs do
not call bindtextdomain or textdomain or setlocale; they're all
English-only.
With that in mind I am planning to have Emacs avoid gnulib-i18n, as it
already ignores 40-some other Gnulib modules. I've built Emacs this way
and it seems to work. Offhand, do you see significant problems with this
approach? If not, I'd like to install the attached doc patch into Gnulib.From ee5d4a97bfa9989e57229650d7e3fc60ba835a02 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Paul Eggert <egg...@cs.ucla.edu>
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2024 13:38:46 -0800
Subject: [PATCH] doc: document non-translation
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
* doc/gnulib-tool.texi (Localization):
Say what to do if you don’t want translations.
---
ChangeLog | 6 ++++++
doc/gnulib-tool.texi | 6 ++++++
2 files changed, 12 insertions(+)
diff --git a/ChangeLog b/ChangeLog
index 5bfb71b28d..3884166725 100644
--- a/ChangeLog
+++ b/ChangeLog
@@ -1,3 +1,9 @@
+2024-12-10 Paul Eggert <egg...@cs.ucla.edu>
+
+ doc: document non-translation
+ * doc/gnulib-tool.texi (Localization):
+ Say what to do if you don’t want translations.
+
2024-05-12 Simon Josefsson <si...@josefsson.org>
announce-gen: Mention git commit and tag in announcement.
diff --git a/doc/gnulib-tool.texi b/doc/gnulib-tool.texi
index 87134315c3..20ad1a3dc0 100644
--- a/doc/gnulib-tool.texi
+++ b/doc/gnulib-tool.texi
@@ -1083,6 +1083,12 @@ If your package has a @code{DEPENDENCIES} file,
for the ease of installers and distributors,
you should add the @samp{gnulib-l10n} dependency in this file.
+If your package does not support localization,
+you can simplify its build process by using
+@code{gnulib-tool}'s @option{--avoid=gnulib-i18n} option.
+The package need not call @code{bindtextdomain} or @code{textdomain},
+and all Gnulib-generated messages will be in American English.
+
Two older methods to use Gnulib localizations are deprecated:
@itemize
--
2.45.2
