Date: Wed, 18 Oct 1995 12:26:07 EST From: "Kaleb S. KEITHLEY" <kaleb@x.org> To: ache@astral.msk.su Cc: hackers@freefall.FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: xterm dumps core Message-ID: <199510181626.MAA29751@exalt.x.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of Wed, 18 Oct 1995 16:49:21 EST. <vmXNGXmSI1@ache.dialup.demos.ru>
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>Why xterm even use locale.alias? I think XFree for FreeBSD builds >for using _system_ locale instead of shipped with X. >I was under impression that XFree was configured to use system >locale instead of its own. Why it even attempts to do something >when system locale present? It is serious bug. Sigh. There is something seriously wrong, but it's not in X. The ANSI/POSIX/ISO locale model is inadequate for describing things like I/O in a graphical user interface. One of the deficiencies is the inability to describe a set of fonts to use for rendering text in an arbitrary locale. Another deficiency is its failure to address input methods, without which keyboard input in Oriental and Arabic languages would be all but impossible. Thus the X locale support is generally used to supplement the system locale; although e.g. on Linux where the system locale support is so weak it's unusable X bypasses the system locale support completely. (It's amazing to me that an OS "developed" by a European should be so deficient in its localization support.) Because OS vendors can't all agree on a single unified naming scheme it is necessary to have a mechanism to map from the various vendor locale names to the corresponding X name. That's all the locale.alias file is for. If you make changes like this without considering how it might affect the things that have dependencies on them, you pretty much get what you deserve. I'm sure you wouldn't make a gratuitous change like moving printf out of libc would you? If you're going to change your locale naming convention then you need to document the change where people can find it and preserve the old names (perhaps with symlinks) long enough that people can find either the changes or the documentation and make the changes necessary in their software to accomodate your changes. -- Kaleb KEITHLEY
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