Re: I18N question

[Jeff Johnson <n3npq jbj gmail com>]

On Jan 12, 2007, at 4:30 PM, Jeszenszky Peter wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I'm working on a Java application that extracts package metadata  
> from RPM
> packages and transforms it to RDF, making RPM metadata available to
> Semantic Web applications.
>
> My question is about the RPMTAG_HEADERI18NTABLE header tag. The  
> value of
> this tag is a string array that has only one element ("C") in each RPM
> package that I have seen. Is this I18N feature really supported in  
> RPM-
> aware software? May I assume that every string in the header is  
> encoded
> in plain old US-ASCII?

RPMTAG_HEADERI81NTABLE stores the keys (i.e. locales) for an  
associative array of strings.

No RedHat package since RHL 6.2 has used the mechanism. What is done  
instead
is to use a 2 level lookup of msgid's and msgstr's using dcgettext().  
There are still
distros that use locale's however, PLD being the first that comes to  
mind.

There are only 3 tags that ever used the associative array lookup:
    RPMTAG_SUMMARY
    RPMTAG_DESCRIPTION
    RPMTAG_GROUP

Meanwhile the much harder problem to solve is that strings in *.rpm
metadata have no well defined encoding. One cannot assume US-ASCII,
not UTF-8, nor LATIN1, nor anything else. Only '\0' terminated may be  
assumed.

In practice, the vast majority of the strings are US-ASCII however.

73 de Jeff