Anaconda needs new locale thinking. (was Re: How important are ISO standards to Fedora?)

[Pekka Pietikainen]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 01:53:20PM -0900, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 1:04 PM, Rodd Clarkson <rodd at clarkson.id.au> wrote:
> >  I may use English US on my computer, but I measure using metric, and
> >  format my dates DD-MM-YYYY and my printer uses A4.  Anaconda doesn't get
> >  any of the latter right, and that's just plain wrong.
> 
> Here's a better question. Why are you using US English? Why aren't you
> using another English locale?
Brits spell some words in a funny way (I wonder if anyone bothers 
"translating" US vs. brit spelling in software tho) ;) 

That said, anaconda asks what _language_ you want to install in.
(LC_MESSAGES) You choose "English" and 

English en      latarcyrheb-sun16       en_US.UTF-8     us America/New_York

all are forced on you. The keymap and timezone you can change within anaconda,
the locale you can't, that goes into /etc/sysconfig/i18n. 

A possiblity would be to add some heuristics to do en_GB.UTF-8 if you choose
Europe/London as the timezone, en_IE.UTF-8 if you choose Europe/Dublin etc.
Some extra code in anaconda, probably a better end-user experience too. 

You could also do a /etc/sysconfig/i18n and ~/.i18n gui editor thing and run
that post-install, one that lets you choose from the various locales for the
various options and also show how how dates etc. would get shown with
different settings. Maybe using the timezone as a "hint".

One problem is also that there's no "International English" locale in glibc.
It would be better than en_US as the default (except for americans).

> 
> I strongly believe that exposing locale customizations to the extent
> necessary to make you happy in anaconda is a really dumb idea.  This
> sort of stuff is a PER USER configuration which is too complicated for
> the installer to need to mess with.
> 
> We set a sane default in the installer based on the locale, and then
> the installer gets the hell out of the way.  if you want to make PER
> USER customizations, then figure out a way to expose PER USER
> customizations for the different locale based settings.
> 
> -jef
> 
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-- 
Pekka Pietikainen