these accept the netbsd/openbsd message catalog file format,
consisting of a sorted list of set headers and a sorted list of
message headers for each set, admitting trivial binary search for
lookups.

the gnu format was not chosen because it's unusably bad. it does not
admit efficient (log time or better) lookups; rather, it requires
linear search or hash table lookups, and the hash function is awful:
it's literally set_id*msg_id.