Stand-Alone lunar calendar

[Ali Abdin <ALIABDIN aucegypt edu>]

I am beginning to become 'more convinced' on working on some sort of 
'test application' of lunar calendar in GNOME. Here is some 
outlines/rough drafts of what I think it should be like:

We can define an arbitrary number of months per year, an arbitrary number 
of days per month. You can also of course customize the names of the 
days/months. These will be store in an XML file for each 'type' of 
calendar. I believe that the 'time' system should be ignored (e.g. the 
default time on the system) cos no calendar (to my knwoledge) effects 
time:) Since this is a lunar calendar (which ihs usually non-English 
languages) how do we 'internationalize' strings in an XML file? This is 
one thing I don't know how to do - Anyone got a clue?

We then take time_t do some dividing by the number of hours and stuff to 
calculate what day/month it is - Year can be set easily by the user. 
There needs to be a 'reference point' that matches epoch date/time with 
the 'lunar date/time' (this is where year figures in) - i want this value 
to be somewhat customizable (i.e should be semi-hidden so a user can't 
change it easily) - Should I get this far, I'll make some sort of 
'release' or something so people can see the app. Then I think at that 
stage i'll need to talk to the gnome-pim maintainers/developers on a way 
to 'fold' this into gnome-pim/gnomecal (which is a whole other ballgame 
of complexity - e.g. scheduling something in gregorian should also show 
up in lunar and vice versa, etc.)

Comments?