for all xfce users out there, I think we should have an option to disable Native Language Support while building xfce. I'm not sure about this, but it can be made via automake/aclocal tools. Such an option didn't exist in previous versions either. It'd be nice to have a '--disable-nls' option for the configure script.
I'm requesting this too.
Why?
Jasper, When I was a Linux user on the i486 machine with 200MB disk space, I was disabled all NLS support for the sake of learning English and my precious disk spaces. Of course it can be possible to use applications with LC_ALL=C environment but it still requires libintl/libiconv and message objects installed there (these .mo files consume many spaces), Also while I strongly support an i18n related improvements, I won't force them to keep company with these stuffs. Andrei, Samuli, In other words, if you just dislike current translations in your language, please contact with the responsible translators each. I know it may puke you with even trivial translation style differences, if not, please don't discard your language unless you are purists as I used to be. Anyway I'll paste my post for the workaround below, http://foo-projects.org/pipermail/xfce/2005-April/013741.html it's not Autotools, rather xdt-autogen (xfce4-dev-tools) to enable a disable option (currently `#define ENABLE_NLS 1', whatever you pass to the configure script).
If disk space is an issue, you would just do rm -f `find $datadir -name '*.mo'`. But unless we're talking about an (probably outdated) embedded device, it is ridiculous to even think about the disk space consumed by the .mo files today. And concerning libintl: I doubt that you will find a modern Linux/Unix system today, where libintl is not already installed by default. While there exists a basic mechanism to disable usage of gettext() and friends (the ENABLE_NLS define mentioned by Daichi), I feel that any further action in this direction is a total waste of time for everyone.
Ok, I'm sorry guys, but I have to agree with Benedikt. It is not worth it for us to spend time on this. 'rm -rf' the mo files and/or setting LC_ALL=C is probably the easiest way to get at least close to what you want.
Personally, I don't care about the disk space it takes, but amount of extra time it adds to actually getting Xfce4 installed on middle aged machine. Talking about quarters, even hour here. Not everybody use a binary distribution..
You know that most of that time is spent in configure and compiler/linker? So what is next, an option to disable the compiler? ;-)