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

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Tue, Jun 08, 2004 at 05:25:11PM +0200, Danilo Segan wrote:
> 
> 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".

Under no conceivable circumstances can any locale change mechanism
be gnome/gtk/glib specific.  Given the ecosystem of projects bundled
with GNOME (mono, mozilla, OOo, adobe, real ...) we can not possibly
offer a ui to configure something that most of them will never see.
 
> 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).

The notion of creating a locale on the fly scares the bejezus out of
me on several levels.
    - There is code that uses the locale name (eg mapping to MS
      Office formats, or manually looking at translations in xml)
      As a result there would be trouble naming the modified locales
    - There are so many configurable elements in a locale that the
      ui would either be a mess or have the potential for over
      simplifiying.  Is the user specifying the number format for
      LC_NUMERIC or LC_MONETARY ?

Before entering this swamp I'd like to see some convincing arguments
that users realllly want/need to create their own locale.