Extent of localisation customisation (was Re: Preferences, System Tools)

[Danilo Segan <danilo gnome org>]

Hi Sergey,

Yesterday at 15:52, Sergey V. Udaltsov wrote:

> Why would you need to remove them - they are useful? About the old way -
> yeah, people can use it. Even to change their locale entirely - so why
> people bothered adding corresponging option to gdm?;) Seriously, I do
> not see why some LC* are more important than others. IMHO gnome should
> either leave the things the way they are - global, single option in gdm
> - and nothing more - or provide configuration for each option. Is
> LC_MESSAGES more important than LC_TIME? Is LC_NUMERIC more important
> than LC_MONETARY? Why?

Whatever GNOME does wouldn't be done on system-level, so there would
be a lot of inconsistent messages.  So, some programs might still
produce locale-based date-format if it's using strftime instead of
"g_strftime".

Imagine some European in US adjusting his date format from mm-dd-yyyy
to dd-mm-yyyy, and one app outputting 07-06-2004 and other 06-07-2004:
so, what date are we talking about in what case?

Realistic goal seems to be to aim for a single platform: i.e. we
could base ourselves on all the locales provided by GNU libc.  If
there's a strong need for a variant locale, then we create a new one
and try to add it to GNU libc (it's trivial to make such simple
changes, but it's not trivial to add new locales to GNU libc, and we
don't want to add thousands there, just ocassional, really needed
ones).

For anyone not familiar with the work of Carlos Perelló (CCed to bring
this discussion to his attention), please look into
gnome-control-center/capplets/localization module, and try that out.
I know some of you know about it, but many here might not.

Cheers,
Danilo