Anaconda needs new locale thinking. (was Re: How important are ISO standards to Fedora?)

[Christian Rose]

On 2/14/08, Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 1:04 PM, Rodd Clarkson <rodd at clarkson.id.au> wrote:
>  >  I may use English US on my computer, but I measure using metric, and
>  >  format my dates DD-MM-YYYY and my printer uses A4.  Anaconda doesn't get
>  >  any of the latter right, and that's just plain wrong.
>
> Here's a better question. Why are you using US English? Why aren't you
>  using another English locale?

Probably because of language differences?


>  I strongly believe that exposing locale customizations to the extent
>  necessary to make you happy in anaconda is a really dumb idea.  This
>  sort of stuff is a PER USER configuration which is too complicated for
>  the installer to need to mess with.

It's not necessarily a per user preference. Language settings are
almost always user preferences, but how can location be a user
preference? It's not like that the student workstations that we are
setting up in our student labs in Sweden will be located in Australia
tomorrow. Not even if a student wants it to be there!

To make it more clear: This is about modifying Anaconda to distinguish
LANGUAGE from LOCATION, instead of making some messed up assumption
about the latter from the former.

You're right that not all use cases would be solved by this. And
probably they shouldn't all be solved in Anaconda either. But by
differentiating LANGUAGE (affecting LANG and LC_MESSAGE settings) from
LOCATION (affecting most other LC_* settings) in Anaconda, we'd come a
long way in sorting this mess out for the majority of use cases.



Christian