Re: gjiten 0.8

[jwb@example.com (Jim Breen)]

Stephen wrote:
>>     B0Ti> I know this is a bad practice but at least it saves me from
>>     B0Ti> getting 5 emails a day asking about displaying
>>     B0Ti> Japanese... ;)
>> 
>> An error message "gjiten only works in the Japanese locale, blowing
>> chunks and bailing out; try setting LANG=ja_JP." would be equally
>> effective.

Or you could do like Win9*J DLLs do with "English" version of
Windblows and freeze the screen, delete the keyboard driver, or best of
all flash up a window full of mojibake for 2 microseconds and vanish
forever.

>> Or a warning message "I don't grok en_$BIaDL(B, internally using ja_JP.eucJP".
>> 
>> Both are acceptable.  Silently doing what the user means is not. If
>> you want to do that, please change to a closed source license so that
>> others won't catch your bad habits.

But up to a point, doing silently what the user means (wants?) is the
way we should be going. HAving software that says "Naughty, naughty. You
can't display Japanese here. There is a variable deep in the system
which declares you to be irrevocably speaking English with a Merkin
accent, so I am duty bound to stop you doing anything else" might make
some people feel better but it leaves me cold. There was some tut-tutting 
recently about kterm ignoring locales. Good on it! 

>>     B0Ti> Anyway, I think all modern distros set these variables to at
>>     B0Ti> least "C".  Potato is history :P
>> 
>> Tubers have nothing to do with it.  Any POSIX system implicitly has
>> all LC_* categories set to "C" by default.

And tell me again how the I18N locale system isn't chronically broken?

Jim
-- 
Jim Breen  [jwb@example.com  http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/]
Visiting Professor, Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of 
Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan
+81 3 5974 3880         [$B%8%`!&%V%j!<%s(B@$BEl5~30Bg(B]