Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Tue, 17 Oct 1995 21:15:16 +1000
From:      Giles Lean <giles@nemeton.com.au>
Subject:   Re: A couple problems in FreeBSD 2.1.0-950922-SNAP 
Message-ID:  <199510171115.VAA09333@nemeton.com.au>
In-Reply-To: <lP2bj6l0P1@ache.dialup.demos.ru> 

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help

On Mon, 16 Jan 1995 23:38:26 +0300 (MSK)  =?KOI8-R?Q?=E1=CE=C4=D2=C5=CA_=FE=C5=D2=CE=CF=D7?= wrote:

> It is very bad karma to call setlocale from main for ctype-oriented
> programs when chars size assumed <= 8bit.

> Only crt0 is proper place for this things.

crt0 is ABSOLUTELY NOT the place to try to "fix" this.  The fix as
Terry has explained very politely and in considerable detail is to
localise individual programs.

Blindly plugging in setlocale() is bad whether you plug it into main()
or into crt0.  Breaking ANSI and ISO standards conformance by plugging
it into crt0 is just a bonus. :-(

If there was a good easy solution to I18N don't you think *someone* in
the standards groups would have pushed it?  Or some proprietary system
would have just *done* it, whether it was standard or not.

This kludge would only be excusable if it *always* worked.  If it
works sometimes and you want to do it on your system, fine, but don't
inflict it on the entire FreeBSD community.

Fortunately the 'right' (standards conformant, clean-ish) solution can
be implemented gradually. Further there is strong motivation for
programs like editors and mailers to be localised and some programs
like xterm are localised already.

Since someone mentioned NetBSD I'll mention that it has very limited
locale support so far, basically limited to the C locale and a couple
or three non-English message catalogs.

Giles



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199510171115.VAA09333>