[development] Locale module and gettext

[Gabor Hojtsy]

Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
> IIRC there has been speculation that using the gettext object files (.mo
> files) for storing translations instead of the database would be a lot
> faster. Unfortunately, I can not confirm this. It seems to be somewhat
> faster but not that much that I'd consider the inclusion of such a
> feature worthwhile. The configuration is rather awkward and error prone.

If this requires the gettext module turned on in PHP, then what is the
point? Push the database based translation support into contrib and
support a mo file based engine in core? Or add a t() API? :) Requiring
the gettext extension without an alternative is IMHO not an option.
Providing a significantly more efficient but PHP configuration dependent
engine could be a good idea though.

Goba