The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Adam Bernstein <address@concealed>]

I'm not sure if this is relevant to many people, or if it was just some
strange random problem on my system, but I thought it might be useful: 

All localization in Sympa 5.1 was broken on our production system
(FreeBSD 4.9), despite working fine on our development system (FreeBSD
5.3) -- the only special treatment is that I have to create symlinks
in /usr/share/locale to mimic the action of /etc/locale.gen
and /etc/locale.aliases (which don't exist under FreeBSD).  The problem
on the production system was that it wouldn't bind to any localization
catalog or translate any strings; the language selector showed 4 blank
choices, though the HTML code actually pointed to 4 languages, and
selecting any of them did nothing.

After a great deal of searching and experimenting, I finally discovered
that an extra Perl module was installed on this system that was not
installed on the dev system, called gettext_xs.pm
(in /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0/Locale), and removing that
module fixed the problem.  This module is apparently a "low level C
interface" (?) to the gettext function, while the alternative
gettext_pp.pm, the "pure Perl interface", is the one that remains now
and works fine.

I don't know where that gettext_xs.pm module came from originally.  Is
this just some weird thing with FreeBSD or with my particular system?
Does gettext_xs.pm work on Linux or other systems?  If not, it would be
great if the Sympa installer could check for it and remove it or warn
about it, so others don't have this totally mystifying problem.

      ab