Using environment variables for configuration (was Re: Comparison between CLDR and POSIX)

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Šegan)]

Today at 19:24, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:

> On Tue, 2005-08-16 at 17:23 +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
>> but I can also very well imagine users who want to
>> have a right-to-left GUI but English for all the rest.
>
> Well, I won't code extra for such users. If he wants such a feature, he
> should customize his locale information instead and change its character
> direction to right-to-left.

I'm going to digress a bit.

I'd argue strongly AGAINST using environment variables as our proposed
configuration mechanism of choice. 

They have big problems in that you can't change them in parent
environments, so any configuration mechanism we're looking to
implement is going to require logging out and then back in, while we
can have it be instant (in at least some cases; most applications are
currently designed that they would need reloading for language
changes).


We do want to go as far as we can to be compatible with current
POSIX layer, but lets not restrict ourselves with it.

For instance, we can have date and time format changes instant-apply
for Gnome Panel Clock applet, and we should have that.  This means
that using environment variables is not going to be sufficient.

(On the compatibility note, I'd like to have as much as possible of
it, but hidden behind a good API; i.e. above mentioned date&time
format changes can also be done for any applications using standard
POSIX API [strftime] on at least GNU libc systems in an instant-apply
way [i.e. next call to strftime would use new values, if we
anticipated this].)

Cheers,
Danilo