[Scrollkeeper-devel] Problem with scrollkeeper i18n support

[Malcolm T. <ma...@co...>]

Presently, scrollkeeper has a fairly strange behvaiour when it comes to
working out what localisation of a contents file to return from
scrollkeeper-get-cl (and aliases like scrollkeeper-get-contents, which
just call the same thing).

The current behaviour when I run

	scrollkeeper-get-cl sv scrollkeeper_cl.xml

if to look in my LANG environment variable and run through all of the
possibilities there. If any of them match the requested locale ('sv'),
then return the 'sv' version of the contents file. If not, as a final
fallback, return the 'C' version of the file. The upshot of this is
that. although I have a Swedish translation on my box, I will always get
the C version since, by default, my LANG variable is set to "en_AU".

Why is this the algorithm that is being used? It should not care what my
current locale is if I specify something on the command line.

It's a fairly simple change to make scrollkeeper-get-cl just cycle
through the passed in locale and its variants and return the first one
that matches. By "cycle through", I mean that running

	scrollkeeper-get-cl sv_SE.ISO8859-1 scrollkeeper_cl.xml

will check (in order) sv_SE.ISO8859-1, sv_SE, sv.ISO8859-1 and sv. As a
final fallback, if none of those possibilities work, we could _then_
consider what is in LANG and finally fall back to C as a last resort.

(Note that by "fairly simple", I mean "I have a tested patch that does
exactly what I described". :-) )

In terms of functionality, this should not break anybody's setup, since
the only thing they will see is possibly a localised contents list that
they asked for, rather than the C version they got because LANG was set
differently to what scrollkeeper thought it should be -- so things will
work better than before.

Looking to the future, this new algorithm makes sense in that you can
have a single box that may serve scrollkeeper documents in many locales
from a script or something, without needing to fool around with working
out what locale is being requested and then having to set LANG as
appropriate.

Anybody have thoughts?

Malcolm
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