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Notes on GCC's Native Language Support

By and large, only diagnostic messages have been internationalized.

Some work remains in other areas; for example, GCC does not yet allow

non-ASCII letters in identifiers.

Not all of GCC's diagnostic messages have been internationalized. Programs

like `genattr' (in fact all gen* programs) are not internationalized, as

their users are GCC maintainers who typically need to be able to read

English anyway; internationalizing them would thus entail needless work for

the human translators. Messages used for debugging, such as used in dumped

tables, should also not be translated.

The GCC library should not contain any messages that need

internationalization, because it operates below the internationalization

library.

Unlike some other GNU programs, the GCC sources contain few instances

of explicit translation calls like _("string").  Instead, the

diagnostic printing routines automatically translate their arguments.

For example, GCC source code should not contain calls like `error

(_("unterminated comment"))'; it should contain calls like `error

("unterminated comment")' instead, as it is the `error' function's

responsibility to translate the message before the user sees it.

By convention, any function parameter in the GCC sources whose name

ends in `msgid' is expected to be a message requiring translation.

If the parameter name ends with `gmsgid', it is assumed to be a GCC

diagnostics format string requiring translation, if it ends with

`cmsgid', it is assumed to be a format string for `printf' family

of functions, requiring a translation.

For example, the `error' function's first parameter is named `gmsgid'.

GCC's exgettext script uses this convention to determine which

function parameter strings need to be translated.  The exgettext

script also assumes that any occurrence of `%eMSGID}' on a source

line, where MSGID does not contain `%' or `}', corresponds to a

message MSGID that requires translation; this is needed to identify

diagnostics in GCC spec strings.

The `G_(GMSGID)' macro defined in intl.h can be used to mark GCC diagnostics

format strings as requiring translation, but other than that it is a

no-op at runtime.

If you modify source files, you'll need at least version 0.14.15 of the

GNU gettext package to propagate the modifications to the translation

tables.

After having built and installed these gettext tools, you have to

configure GCC with --enable-maintainer-mode to get the master catalog

rebuilt.