10.1.2 Problems with the catgets Interface?!

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