Locating message catalogs

[Andy Heninger <he...@us.ibm.com>]

We need to think about where and how message catalog files should be located
on the Unix like platforms that are using the MsgCatalogLoader class.

Until now, the files have been located relative to the xerces-c DLL, using
the same code that we were using to find the transcoder files when using ICU
based transcoding.

This DLL locating code has always been a bit unreliable, not very portable,
and a general support headache.  With the new ICU, we will no longer be
using the DLL position to locate the transcoder files, and I hope to be able
to completely remove the find-your-dll code altogether.

My question is, where do UNIX based applications typically put their
resources and/or message catalogs at install time, and how do they find them
at run-time?  If there's some generally accepted way of doing this, we
should probably match it.

So, is there an answer?  Whatever we do, non-privileged users should be able
to do installs, and there should be no extra environment variables involved
Both of these cause no end of problems.

  -- Andy