If you distribute your code in a zipped egg, you can't use translation catalogs stored in that egg.  That's because gettext.py only knows how to find the translation catalogs in the actual filesystem.

This wouldn't be so bad if the "find" function didn't serve double duty.  On the one hand, it implements the "find" algorithm to pick the right languages and fallbacks.  On the other hand, it actually resolves the files in the filesystem.  It would be nice if these were separate.  It seems like people in projects like Pylons are stuck copying code from the find function in order to work around this problem.

Perhaps gettext can be updated to know about eggs.  Perhaps setting localedir to something like "egg://..." would enable this functionality.