Re: Preferences, System Tools

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Sun, Jun 06, 2004 at 03:39:06PM -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-06-06 at 14:15 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > On Fri, 2004-06-04 at 19:06, Curtis Hovey wrote:
> > > On Fri, 2004-06-04 at 15:01 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote
> > > > Internationalization
> > > >       * Keyboard layout
> > > >         (may additionally have a panel presence) 
> > > >       * Language
> > > 
> > > What of locale?  Are date and number formats implicit in the items
> > > above?
> > 
> > I would assume those come from the active language/locale yes. Not sure
> > we need "English messages and French number format" in the GUI.
> 
> I hate proposing this kind of cruft, but I think date format would be
> useful.  US seems fond of mm-dd-yyyy, which I think is a pretty stupid
> format.  Also, being able to select the date format would let people
> choose how verbose they want it (e.g. '2004-06-06' or 'Jun 6, 2004' or
> 'Sunday, the Sixth Day of the Month of June, in the Two Thousand and
> Fourth Year of our Lord').

That is a whole ne wlevel of configurability.  The current mechanism
provides only for selecting some a canned set of formats.
Overriding actual values of the locale keys would bring with it a
whole new set of fun.  The current set of configurable items is
large and at times overlapping.  eg there is a numeric decimal point
and a distinct monetary decimal point (ditto for thousands sep).
There is no strong consensus as far as I can tell w.r.t. _which_ key
to use.

If people decide that we really want to over ride individual
elements, then we need a way to do it system wide, not just for
apps using a 'GnomeLocale' thing-a-ma-bob.

Additionally we should be very clear that changing locales at run
time is non trivial.  Gtk and most apps are not setup to regenerate
user visible content when the underlying locale changes.   This is
disagreement in the CC camp on whether to require a logout/in cycle
to make a change or whether to just load things on startup.  The
former seems safer.