Hi Bret,
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes I would say the FreeDOS tradition is to use 2 letter codes without explicitly specifying the intended codepage, because both setting LANG and loading the codepage are typically done in config and autoexec and it is easy to edit both at the same time without linking them in any automated ways. I would also suggest to NOT guess the language based on the codepage. For example I could be using an European non-English CP850 or CP858 for more accented characters, but still prefer English messages from default DOS apps. This might be simply because only some of the apps have translations anyway, so it is more consistent to use only English messages even when my documents are German, Dutch or similar. Automatically generating warnings about the current codepage not being suitable for the selected language file also feels like overdoing things, because in the end, codepages are the opposite of Unicode: Not a one size fits all solution, but something manually chosen. Even having a list of suitable codepages in a special item in each message file could be tricky, because it will depend on which subset of accented chars you need. Often, selecting the wrong codepage only causes a few characters to display in the wrong way, so people may even do that deliberately because their documents work better with one codepage while they want to see their apps in a language which might prefer slightly different codepages etc. In short, I think it is fine that DOS stores country, layout, language, codepage etc. separately, which lets people manipulate those separately. The installer can set them all at once and you could have a batch script which updates all settings at once, but it still is good to be able to modify them independent from each other. For example because you do not want to use 1.234,56 German numbers even though you have apps with German translations, because you know that sooner or later some app will expect "international" 1,234.56 anyway. Of course this is also a matter of taste, just expressing my personal feelings about the topic here :-) By the way, most of Belgium speaks either Flemish (which is very similar to Dutch) or French. Some areas even do speak German. Speaking BOTH main languages also is quite common in some areas. And then there are those "weird" trends in keyboard layout in France, Belgium and the NL! > Comments/suggestions/ideas/insults? See above. No insult, of course, but I am not convinced that changing anything beyond having a "service batch script" to ease config updates would be actually useful. Of course such a script is welcome to have two modes of operation: Immediate switch and config/autoexec update. Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
