Re: Random thoughts

[Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh farsiweb info>]

On Thu, 2005-08-11 at 08:29 +0200, Danilo Šegan wrote:
> > 2) Do we want to use glib data types?
> 
> I'd lean for YES, but now that Bruno is proposing merging all this
> with glocale, it pretty much influences the decision.

Well, this should be the main question to answer. Do we want to merge
with glocale?

Everyone can name very good reasons why we should do it, but there also
a few important reasons for not doing it:

1) If we want to make it use a liberal license, like BSD/MIT, we
shouldn't merge.

2) If we merge, we should probably need to move it outside GNOME. We
will lose a wonderful community, who are both very friendly, and
generally have a diverse knowledge of i18n and l10n issues (from Owen
Taylor to several localization teams).

I'm personally for merging efforts, but am worried about some of the
implications.

> We'll definitely need some mmap()-able format

That's agreed.

> whether we'll create
> such a cache automatically or in-front with some tool is not really
> important.

I am beginning to think that it is. CLDR dreams about exchanging locale
bits between platforms and applications in the XML format itself (read
the intro to LDML). With all the aliasing, XPath-es, and sideway
inheritances, we better do it cleanly and not create an intermediate
binary.

> > * Doing the Right Thing for users who login under different locales.
> > Should we keep their time format setting for the new locale, or did they
> > only set it for the locale they were using previously?
> 
> It doesn't matter: whatever choice we make it's not going to be
> completely correct, so I don't think we need to worry about this one,
> but rather just do the one thing and be over with it.

Well, since the user who does such switches is not a normal user, we
probably need to do the simplest and easiest to remember thing. I'd
recommend keeping the settings tied to the locale his desktop (gconf
instance, to word it better) is running under.

roozbeh