Re: TZ and i18n files.

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Tuesday, March 19, 2002, at 09:36 PM, Tim Harrison wrote:

> Please, don't kill me for asking this question. :)
>
> While working on the final build for LinuxSTEP 0.2.5, I ran across 
> something that made me go "hrmm".
>
> I was making the package of glibc 2.2.5, and realised that I now had 
> two places to specify timezones and i18n stuff.  GNUstep has it's own 
> directories for that, as does glibc.
>
> I know that it would break portability to have GNUstep depend on those 
> files from glibc, as not every system uses it.  However, if the files 
> are similar (as I believe they all come from a common source), would 
> adding, say, --with-alt-tz=/path/to/files and --with-alt-
> i18n=/path/to/files be a horrific thing?  That way, you'd only have one 
> place on the filesystem containing those types of files, instead of 
> two.  Not to mention, it would make my life easier on LinuxSTEP. ;)
>
> Let me just point out that I'm not totally familiar with this specific 
> topic, so this is just a curiosity post.

The subject has come up before ...

The current implementation has the advantages of being portable and of 
letting us keep the information
up to date without depending on external software.  For those reasons, 
we want to keep it.

There is no reason why we can't have additional mechanisms too ... but 
someone needs to write and
maintain the code to handle any additional operating system specific  
mechanisms.