Coming from openSUSE, might be a bit special, but worthy the discussion.

Background:
 - Language files are per design split off from the main application rpm (package-lang). Rational is 'space concerns for live CDs'
- We offer bundle-lang-<LANG> packages, with a set of commonly used applications translations bundled in one 'Please translate my system to LANG' RPM. Again: for the Live CD, we do bundle a limited set of language files (thus installing a subset of all .mo files provided by all packages).

=> now as rpm does not like a file at the same location to be owned by two packages, the bundle-lang-<LANG> package 'moves' it's own .mo files to /usr/share/locale-bundle, wheras the <PACKAGE>-lang rpm installs the .mo files under /usr/share/locale (default path).

Now, the issue is gettext.py checks the path proposed by the calling app using bindtextdomain(domain,[path]).

If path is defined, it's being used, otherwise /usr/share/locale is being used.

The attached patch extends the logic to:
- If path is being used
  - If path = _default_localedir
    - Check for .mo in _default_bundlelocaledir
    - if not found in bundle, check in _default_localedir
  - Use path
- if path is not defined
  - use _default_bundlelocaledir
    - if not found, use _default_localedir

=> so in any case, if default_bundlelocaledir is not used, it falls back to _default_localedir, and as such I'd argue is unintrusive and keeping the patch in upstream codebase (instead of downstream package) would make sense.

Best regards,