Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] Clarification about language tag

[Dan M. <mu...@al...>]

On 13 May 2002, Christian Marillat wrote:

> >> "DM" == Dan Mueth <mu...@al...> writes:
> 
> [...]
> 
> [SF seem to filter some doain name like wanaddo.fr, so I can't post to
> this list with my current address. Somebody konw where I can complain
> about this feature ?]

Is the wanaddo.fr email address subscribed?  I suspect the mailing list
only accepts posts from subscribers (although I'm not positive about
that).

> > On a technical level, it doesn't work because (a) we technically didn't
> > translate the categories into 'en', and (b) we don't list 'en' as one of
> > the supported locales. (We list the supported locales in
> > cl/templates/Makefile.am.)  So, supporting 'en' is about as hard as
> > writing the po file for it.
> 
> en is the same as C no ? 

Not precisely.  Most (all?) distributions and application packagers put 
all their English documents in the C locale.  My understanding is that 
C is just the fallback locale - if the user does not have a specified 
locale or an application is not localized into the user's locale, the C 
localization is used.  The convention is to use English for C.  Most 
people don't bother to create an en.po file since it is redundant. 
Similarly, I don't think anybody bothers to install documentation as if it 
were in the en locale, or write OMF files listing the locale as 'en'.  
Technically people could do all this, but I don't know of occasions where 
there is anything to gain by doing so since the fallback system defers to 
English anyway.

> About supported locale, if nobody is already working on French
> translation, I can do that.

Thanks :)

The current status of the French translation is:
184 translated messages, 3 fuzzy translations, 9 untranslated messages.

> > I always assumed the standard was to use the fallback locale, C, for
> > documents in English, and that there wasn't much point in setting one's
> > locale to 'en' or setting the locale in an OMF file to 'en'.  Of course
> > English is my first language and I'm no expert on locales, so I may be
> > missing something.  Is there a reason why we should install English 
> > documents under both the C locale and en locale?  Or do some distributions 
> > not put english documents in the C locale and instead put them under the 
> > en locale?
> 
> Read http://bugs.debia.org/144730 for full explanation.

I think ScrollKeeper is generally doing things properly.  The main thing
which is ambiguous (IMO) is how much ScrollKeeper should do locale
fallback and detection of user's locale. I used to think ScrollKeeper
should look at the locales and try to do the right things.  However, I now
think that ScrollKeeper is more of a database and should just keep track
of the data and leave the locale detection and fallback to the help
browser.  This way the browser can let the user configure what they want
using preferences instead of expecting everybody has their shell variables
and system configurations set up the right way.  It also makes sense when
you consider things like web application where there aren't meaningful
shell variables.  So, while ScrollKeeper currently *does* do locale 
fallback based on the environment variables, we may want to remove this in 
the future.

One thing which is messed up is that the way it is currently doing locale
fallback is pretty broken.  I need to review what exactly it is doing, but
it often doesn't work properly.  This may be contributing to the 
confusion.

Dan