Re: Unhelpful error message

[John Ralls <jralls ceridwen fremont ca us>]

On Oct 5, 2013, at 4:26 PM, Steve White <stevan white gmail com> wrote:

> Hi John,
>
> I'm afraid your suggestion is awful.  It's prolix and scarcely more
> helpful than the existing one.  The (rough) suggestion I provided
> would be much better.
One more time: The suggestion you provided isn't feasible. Gtk doesn't know
what the problem locale is. It can find out, but that's really not its job, it's the
application's job before starting Gtk.

If you want something more terse, how about:
"You messed up your locale settings. Fix it or get a Mac. Meanwhile, I'm in English."

> Is it not possible for an application to set the locale to something
> unsupported by the OS?  I think I've seen this message in situations
> that had nothing to do with environment variables.

It's possible for the application to mess things up. Not likely, but possible. That's not
Gtk's problem. It's not even Gtk's problem that it has an unfriendly error message, 
because the application (which should be localizing way more than Gtk is) should be
checking the localization and providing whatever feedback its developers think is 
appropriate before starting Gtk, so that users never see Gtk's warning.

Regards,
John Ralls