[squeak-dev] Locale

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Wed Feb 24 01:34:38 UTC 2016


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.
> 
> 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.

So I would vote for the separate #automaticTimezone preference because it
says what it does and it does what it says.

Dave



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