Moving right-to-left locale detection into locale definition

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad cs toronto edu>]

Hi again,

As everybody these days knows, there are languages that are
written from right-to-left, instead of the common left-to-right
direction.  Major scripts that are written rtl (right-to-left)
are Arabic and Hebrew, which results in languages Arabic,
Persian, and Hebrew, etc.

rtl languages need extra attention in software i18n, specially
in layout design.  Currently Gtk+ detects rtl languages, by
leaving it to the translator to translate the special string
"default:LTR" to either "default:LTR" or "default:RTL".

As any display oriented tool set needs to detect rtl languages,
I'm going to propose addition of a proper tag in the locale
definition, so tool sets can simply look it up in the locale,
instead of adding higher protocols to define rtl languages.  Gtk+
is free to use both methods so.

My question is now, what other information you think Gtk+ is
providing for each locale, which in fact belongs to the locale
definition itself?

Cheers
--behdad
  behdad.org