[squeak-dev] Locale

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Thu Feb 25 21:23:57 UTC 2016


> On 23-02-2016, at 5:34 PM, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 03:52:57PM -0800, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> We do have a preference useLocale that governs whether the Locale plugin should be used. If enabled, the system tries to load translation files on startup. Only Etoys ever shipped with translations, so this fails in a squeak.org image. That???s why the preference was off in all releases.

My understanding is that the concept of Locale is supposed to be a nice way to gather up a bunch of preferences (currency symbol & format, number formatting, favourite breakfast item, etc) which seems like a good way to simplify the preferences setting dance.

The fact that one part - the language translation files - isn’t supported completely doesn’t seem like it should stop us using the rest. Just handle being unable to load them!

>> 
>> That preference also (if someone enabled it in their image) used to set the local time zone on startup. We now have a different mechanism for that, which continuously tracks the system???s time zone across daylight savings and location changes. This can be disabled by ???DateAndTime automaticTimezone: false???.
>> 
>> Chris is proposing to enable the useLocale preference, and make the timezone updating dependent on it, instead of having a separate preference for that. This is to support users who may have been setting their locale manually, or used that preference to enable timezone updating, and are not aware of the new preference. The useLocale preference would govern both the automatic time zone setting in DateAndTime and the use of Locale plugin for language setting at startup.
>> 
>> What do you all think?
>> 
> 
> In general, I do not like adding more preferences, period. That said, the
> preferences that we do have should produce some effect that I as a user can
> understand, and they should be documented accordingly.
> 
> The help message for #automaticTimezone explains what the preference does,
> and preference does with the help message says. That is good.
> 
> The help message for useLocale says "Use the system locale to set the
> system language etc at startup". That is also clear, but as a user I would
> have no way of guessing that an additional side effect would be to control
> time zone behavior.

The general definition of Locale used in software is the Posix standard which doesn’t include the timezone (which I must admit puzzles me a little, but what do I know?)
So my suggestion is to have an auto-tz option and ability to set a specific TZ for whatever reason, and to make locales work even when the translation file(s) may be missing.



tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
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