Re: glibc a requirement? (was RE: Russian in traditional orthography support)

[F Wolff <friedel translate org za>]

Op Do, 2011-09-15 om 10:51 +0300 skryf Ihar Hrachyshka:
> On 09/15/2011 10:49 AM, Johannes Schmid wrote:
> > Hi!
> > 
> >> I've actually wanted to raise this topic a while ago. Why is this a
> >> requirement?
> > 
> > I think it's rather a technical problem that you cannot really set your
> > environment to use a language that isn't supported by glib but I might
> > be wrong.
> > 
> 
> You can, localedef + custom locale file is the (official, upstream
> approved!) way. But then you should also make sure your users also have
> the same locale file in their setup (aka 'provide it in their Unix
> distribution package).

Well, I'm trying to understand this, because I think we loose possible
contributors. Generating a glibc locale is a big hurdle for people to
cross and a big demotivator.

I have a few partial translations of GTK+ to commit for some African
languages. These often don't have glibc locales, yet we support
localised UIs for these languages in Virtaal through an application
setting or environment variable, even on Windows where some of these
languages don't have locales and might never have.

We are translating loads of date and time formatting strings in every
third GNOME app, and the best reason I've heard is to be able to run on
other platforms (I assume Solaris and the BSDs). So it seems that even
there we don't need a glibc locale. (If we really need a glibc locale,
I'd love to kill a few strftime strings that we keep translating over
and over).

Friedel

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