George W Gerrity <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > This correspondence thread (and others) has raised a question in my > mind that someone may be able to answer. It appears that a LOT of > problems could be settled if a better locale environment standard > for *UNIX* (and clones) were to be put in place. I have in mind the > sort of structures that are inherent in the old Macintosh system, > where a locale environment included a set of keyboard mappings and > input methods, country and language codes, methods of writing dates > and time, and collating sequences. > > Of course, in a *UNIX* (POSIX) OS, the structure would be a set of > methods associated with a locale environment, maybe like the > localisation structures in Java Text classes. > > The question is -- is there anyone working on standardising this > aspect so that it IS meaningful to query environment variables and > expect to get the relevant information?
This sounds a bit like moving from TERM to TERMCAP. If I remember correctly, TERM holds the name of a terminal, so applications have to look up the capabilities of the terminal in some sort of database: bad luck if it's not there. TERMCAP, on the other hand, describes the capabilities of the terminal using a long string of gibberish, so you don't need the database. So, what you're suggesting is that instead of having an environment variable LANG (LC_CTYPE, etc) that just names the locale, you have an environment variable that completely describes the locale, so you don't need to worry about local and remote systems refering to possibly inconsistent databases (sets of installed locales). Now, you obviously wouldn't want to encode the entire table of UCS character properties in an environment variable: even if it were practicable you probably wouldn't want to give people an easy way of creating private variations of Unicode. However, there are aspects of the current locale system that look to me as though they might make more sense if they were treated more in the TERMCAP way. Edmund -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
