Re: [Discuss-gnustep] Localization

[Jonathan Gapen]

On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, Nicola Pero wrote:
> it (we still need a better guess of the languages from the environment in
> NSUserDefault but I'll take care of that as soon as I have the time - the
> biggest work is that we probably need a big table translating the ISO
> codes used in gettext to the GNUstep language names).

    Oh BTW, a while back I re-wrote a huge chunk of NSUserDefaults,
because the old code is a minor disaster with regards to the behavior
described in Apple's documentation.  (I've tested it for a long time now,
so unless anybody has objections, I'll check it in soon.)  I took out the
code that tried to get the locale from the environment, because it's
GNUstep-specific.  Furthermore, I'm not conviced it's a good idea.  If we
do the check in a method that gets the user's preferred languages, that
doesn't account for applications that grab the NSLanguages defaults key
directly.  It's not at all a good idea for NSUserDefaults to re-write the
NSLanguages value, because it violates the principle of least surprise.  
(E.g. if the user sets the environment differently for one application,
it'd re-write her user defaults for all applications!)
    This is another instance of a problem I've seen come up more lately:  
GNUstep-as-environment vs. GNUstep-as-API.  The current GNUstep code base
leans heavily toward environment.  To wit, it draws its own menus, its own
widgets, has its own event loops, its own threads, and of course maintains
its own user settings database, et cetera.  IMHO, GNUstep-as-API requires
some entirely new code.  E.g. NSUserDefaults-gnome.m, a front-end to the
GNOME user settings system, or NSUserDefaults-win32.m, a front-end to the
registry, leaving NSUserDefaults.m alone as part of the GNUstep
environment.

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