State of Lua and GNU gettext?

["Dinu Gherman" <gherman@...>]

Hi,

I've subscribed temporarily to this list in order to get some qualified
response after sort of failing to find it via the usual search engines.

I'm not really a Lua user in the sense of writing code, but I sometimes
contribute translations to a project written largely in Lua, Liquid
Feedback, see [1] (and apart from that I translated Roberto's book into
German a while ago, see [2]). At the beginning I considered LQFB's
approach to i18n/l10n to be very "simple-minded" to put it mildly, see
e.g. [3].

So I did some research (including archives of this list) to find out
if Lua supported GNU gettext which I think can safely be considered
a standard which is backed by many tools. Unfortunately, I haven't
found a definitive conclusion other than GNU gettext not supporting
Lua and Lua not providing standard tools for handling gettext files
(.pot/.po/.mo).

Therefore my question is, more or less, is that really so? And if it
is, what's the recommended method for handling i18n/l10n in Lua?

Being more at home in the Python camp I can see there some gettext com-
patible tools [4, 5] and I would expect this to be possible in Lua as
well.

Thanks,

Dinu


[1] http://www.public-software-group.org/liquid_feedback
[2]  
https://www.opensourcepress.de/index.php?26&backPID=300&swords=lua&tt_products=87
[3]  
http://www.public-software-group.org/mercurial/liquid_feedback_frontend.devel/rev/b2af739019ba
[4] http://docs.python.org/library/i18n.html
[5] http://svn.python.org/projects/python/trunk/Tools/i18n/