gettext: Problems with catgets

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1 11.1.2 Problems with the ‘catgets’ Interface?!
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1    Now that this description seemed to be really easy — where are the
1 problems we speak of?  In fact the interface could be used in a
1 reasonable way, but constructing the message catalogs is a pain.  The
1 reason for this lies in the third argument of ‘catgets’: the unique
1 message ID. This has to be a numeric value for all messages in a single
1 set.  Perhaps you could imagine the problems keeping such a list while
1 changing the source code.  Add a new message here, remove one there.  Of
1 course there have been developed a lot of tools helping to organize this
1 chaos but one as the other fails in one aspect or the other.  We don’t
1 want to say that the other approach has no problems but they are far
1 more easy to manage.
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