issues with gettext on multithreaded servers

Hi all,

I have found some problems (and possible solutions) concerning use of the
gettext extension on multithreaded servers.

Usually gettext determines the locale to use for translations from one of
the following environment variables: LC_MESSAGES, LANG, LANGUAGE, LC_ALL.
These environment variables are usually set with calls to setlocale().

In multithreaded server environments, such as IIS on win32, this setup works
fine IF you only want to use a single locale across all php requests. All
threads/request call setlocale() with the same locale.

However a typical reason to internationalize a php web application is to
allow users to choose their own locale. Currently gettext on a
multithreaded server will not support this scenario. As each thread calls
setlocale() they will be setting the current locale for ALL threads.

A solution on win32 is to use the thread-aware NLS win32 API [1]. The
current win32 build of gettext (libintl-1.dll) will call GetThreadLocale()
to determine locale if none of the environment variables listed above are
set. For this to work though, SetThreadLocale() must be called previously.

My first thought was that the win32 implementation of php setlocale() should
call SetThreadLocale() instead. The benefit of this option would be
transparency to the user. But I don't like this option since it mixes the
old NLS API with the new one. Also setlocale() by definition sets the
environment variables, which will cause gettext to never call
GetThreadLocale().

The alternative then is to call SetThreadLocale() through a new php
extension. I think this should be seperate from the gettext extension since
locales are used more widely than just gettext. My current idea is to
create an extension named w32nls. This would be a win32 only extension that
would provide access to a collection of the functions in the win32 NLS API
[1] including Get/SetThreadLocale().

Other usful functions include replacements for php functions that are
dependent on any of the LC_* environment variables. These functions would
suffer from the same problems as gettext in a multithreaded environment
where each thread sets different locales. For example the strftime()
function relies on the LC_TIME environment variable. The alternative
functions, GetDateFormat() and GetTimeFormat(), could be provided in the
w32nls extension.

The downside however will be increased incompatibility between win32 and
unix based PHP applications if such an extension is ever widely used.

I welcome any feedback on these ideas before I proceed.
Thanks, Nathan

[1]
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/intl/nls_52
lh.asp