gettext() and messages in 'pkg' domain

On Sun, 30 Dec 2007, Philippe Grosjean wrote:

Hello,

As I understand it, gettext() is designed to retrieve messages from
'R-pkg' domains. As such, it cannot retrieve some of the messages in the
'pkg' domains (those supposed to be accessed by C code only, I know),
namely, all messages ending with space(s) or \n. This is clearly
indicated in ?gettext (at least for trailing spaces):

"For 'gettext', leading and trailing whitespace is ignored when looking
for the translation."

(\n _is_ whitespace).

So, my questions:
1) Do I really need to write C code to retrieve all messages from 'pkg'
domain?

Yes.

2) Wouldn't it be useful to add an argument to gettext() (like trim =
TRUE), or alternatively, to propose a Gettext() function in utils
packages that allows retrieving those messages with trailing space(s) or
\n in 'pkg' domain from R code?

Apparently only useful to you: it's certainly not useful for the 
internationalization of R itself, and I don't see why you can't organize 
the package so that the C-level messages don't have leading/trailing 
whitespace *if* you want to mix up domains.