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On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, Andre Charbonneau wrote:

> configuration file (which are then used by the KConfig class).  Also, it

Correct.

> looks like the default values for the localization settings are not
> dependent on the language/country setting at the system level (using the
> LANG environment variable), but are hardcoded into KDE's classes.  To my

KDE will use LANG for default language. For the rest (dates, time, numbers
etc) we will use some hardcoded defaults. I guess we could do something
like this:

  QStrimg time, nt;
  const char *tmp = getenv("LC_TIME");
  splitLocale(QString::fromLatin1(tmp), nt, time, nt);
  if (time.isEmpty())
  {
    tmp = getenv("LANG");
    splitLocale(QString::fromLatin1(tmp), nt, time, nt);
  }

(not tested, but was supposed to use the location part of LC_TIME or
LANG.)

> at the system level and how the locale files are formatted and it seems
> feasible to implement a utility to modify the system level locale files
> accordingly, and then automatically running the 'localedef' utility to
> create the appropriate binary files.  This 'locale editing' utility

localedef is specific to Linux. We will have to figure out how that works
on *BSD, Solaris, HP-UX etc as well. Compiling locales shouldn't be a
problem, but how do we use them? Should they be used even if KDE is not
runing or just by programs started by KDE? If so we would have to modify
the user's .profile or .bash_profile (depending on the shell). I'm not
sure if that should happend without a warning.

How can you use our l10n in libc. Let's day you have a
date format such as (kdebase/l10n/no/entry.desktop):
%A %e. %B %Y

Converting wouldn't be hard. In fact, it's almost the same format as
strftime uses. But last time I tried, ls (*BSD ls, dunno about
GNU) displayed the dates incorrectly when I changed the length of the date
format (e.g. adding dots (".")).

> could be a library that the localization setup apps in KDE would link to
> and therefore the user will have an option that will allow him/her to
> decide if the changes to the locale settings should be at a KDE level
> only or at the system level.

I agree that it would be nice if kcmlocale was able to change the locale
for non-KDE applications as well.

-bieker-

Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Engineering Cybernetics
                 bieker@stud.ntnu.no / bieker@kde.org