Re: Random thoughts

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad cs toronto edu>]

On Thu, 11 Aug 2005, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:

> 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?

Definitely.

> 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.

Not necessarily.  We should merge.  We should go BSD.  I go into
detail in replies to your original and Bruno's message.  We eat
the cake and have it too :).


> 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).

No, we don't have to (or should) move.  Why do you think so?
Again, eat it and have it.


> > 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.

You definitely have no idea what it means to go without mmap
cache.  Just don't think about it again, it's simply useless.
Either keep our word, or go read fontconfig archives.  Parsing
XML locales at runtime would mean miliseconds of time and
hundreds kilobytes of memory /per-application/.  Just forget
about it.  About the exchanging thing, aren't fonts exchangable
nowadays?  Why do you run fc-cache then?  Lets just copy Keith
Packard, whatever you can think of, he's been there long ago ;).

> > > * 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.

All these are really details on the scale that I think about it.
Lets design the components, not micro-features of one.

> roozbeh

--behdad
http://behdad.org/