Dear Wiki user, You have subscribed to a wiki page or wiki category on "Stdcxx Wiki" for change notification.
The following page has been changed by MartinSebor: http://wiki.apache.org/stdcxx/LocaleLookup The comment on the change is: Updated Problem Statement and added Objective. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ = Problem Statement = - Modern operating systems provide support for dozens or even hundreds locales. The set of locales installed on a computer is typically determined by the system administrator at the time the operating system is installed. Although there are standards and conventions in place to establish a common locales names due to historical reasons locale names tend to vary from one implementation to another. Operating systems may provide the standard names as well as the traditional ones, with the former simply being aliases for the latter. + Modern operating systems provide support for dozens or even hundreds locales encoded in various codesets. The set of locales and codesets installed on a computer is typically determined by the system administrator at the time the operating system is installed. Although there are standards and conventions in place to establish a common set of locale names, due to historical reasons both locale and codeset names tend to vary from one implementation to another. Operating systems may provide the standard names as well as the traditional ones, with the former simply being aliases for the latter. - The stdcxx test suite contains tests that exercise the behavior of the localization library. Since the set of installed locales may vary from server to server and since their names need not be consistent across different operating systems, the test stdcxx driver provides mechanisms to determine the names of all locales known to a system. For simplicity, the tests exercise the localization library in all these locales. On systems with many locales installed running these tests may take a considerable amount of time and use up valuable system resources. For example, on AIX systems with all available locales installed running each test can take as much as an hour. Since many of the locale names reference the same locale exercising all of them is wasteful. In addition, since many locales differ only in very minor details (e.g., the values of punctuator characters), exhaustively testing all of them ends up repeatedly executing the same code paths and is unnecessary. + The stdcxx test suite contains tests that exercise the behavior of the localization library. Since the set of installed locales may vary from server to server and since their names need not be consistent across different operating systems, the test stdcxx driver provides mechanisms to determine the names of all locales known to a system. For simplicity, many tests exercise the localization library using all these locale names. Other tests do so in an effort to exercise different code paths taken based on whether a locale uses a single-byte or multi-byte encoding. On systems with many installed locales running these tests may take a considerable amount of time and use up valuable system resources. For example, on AIX systems with all available locales installed running each test can take as much as an hour. In addition, since many of the locale names reference the same locale exercising all of them is wasteful. In addition, since many locales differ only in very minor detail s (e.g., the values of punctuator characters), exhaustively testing all of them ends up repeatedly executing the same code paths and is unnecessary. + + = Objective = + + The objective of this project is to provide an interface to make it easy to write localization tests without the knowledge of platform-specific details that provide sufficient code coverage and that complete in a reasonable amount of time (ideally seconds as opposed to minutes). The interface must make it easy to query the system for locales that satisfy the specific requirements of each test. For example, most tests that currently use all installed locales (e.g., the set of tests for the `std::ctype` facet) only need to exercise a representative sample of the installed locales without using the same locale more than once. Thus the interface will need to make it possible to specify such a sample. Another example is tests that attempt to exercise locales in multibyte encodings whose `MB_CUR_MAX` ranges from 1 to 6 (some of the `std::codecvt` facet tests). The new interface will need to make it easy to specify such a set of locales without explicitly naming them, and it will need to retrieve such locales without returning duplicates. = Definitions =
