Re: change an environment variable in a running gnome session

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sun, 2005-07-31 at 18:00 -0400, Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> Shaun McCance <shaunm gmail com> writes:
> 
> > This is far from trivial.  A lot of applications do more than just
> > gettext on GTK+ labels, and changing an Xsetting or something else
> > isn't going to magically make them refresh all their data.  I'm not
> > saying it's not a worthy cause.  But many applications are written
> > assuming that locale information doesn't change in their lifecycle,
> > so there will be a lot of work ahead of us to get all these apps
> > responding to locale changes.
> 
> This is starting to become a FAQ.  I threw together a little page about
> what's needed if someone wants to attempt this.
> 
> http://live.gnome.org/GTK+/DynamicLanguages
> 

I think it's insane, personally ... it's just like session management,
only 10x worse: it requires every app to make complex, rarely-tested,
and pervasive changes; and it's only useful if every app does this
thoroughly and robustly. Nobody is going to want to switch languages
dynamically if half the apps (or strings in apps) don't work (or quite
likely in this case, half the apps crash).

Since there's no chance of it ever really working it's better to just
require logout and login, probably...

Havoc