[lazarus] Localization site

[Florian Klaempfl]

At 13:36 16.09.2002 +0200, you wrote:
>MHO:
>
>The nice thing about Unix, is its modularity. This is what I love about 
>Unix, and hate about Windows (lack of). As I see it, Free Pascal and 
>potentially Lazarus tend to do a lot of things on its own, still 
>essentially the same way as others. Sometimes it is needed for 
>crossplatformness, sometimes just because someone feels like it. This is 
>not a rant, I myself am curious to see where it leads - maybe it will show 
>up as a more powerful direction. As I see it, though, there is a lot of 
>duplication and incosistencies with the rest of the operating system and 
>its applications (read Linux here) as a result.
>
>It's a number of these little things, for example:

Common for a all points: your arguments may be true for Linux but FPC runs 
on a lot of other platforms...


><rant mode>
>
>- just type fpc - it lists 40 lines and wants Enter - why?

For people don't know fpc or for lazy people :)

>I can use fpc|more or fpc|less, I have a bigger terminal, and it bugs me 
>to hit Enter several times

Do a fpc -h|more and you'll be fine.

I think the fpc solution is much more user friendly than the default 
behavior of unix tools, i.e.
an integrated "more". Though the terminal line determination may be buggy.

>- sorting, uppercasing, lowercasing procs do not take into account locale. 
>Sure, it is a lot of work, but it's already in glibc (that's why it may 
>take about 20MB installed in the system), which all (not just C) program 
>rely on. FPC does not relay to glibc and rather duplicates the work, so we 
>end up with unusable sorting for anyone else except Englishmen.

A glibc based solution might be unusable for non unix systems thus we want 
a generic solution. The linux/unix
solution might use glibc based code. OTOH we decided a long time ago that 
the core rtl won't use glibc.

>- [I may be misinformed here] - why fpcmake? Why not standard GNU 
>autoconf/make stuff? It is meant to be programming language independent, right?

1. make doesn't take care of interdepended units
2. making everything with make is too slow just compare the build times of 
C programs and of pascal programs :)
3. see above

>- rewriting of stuff that is in Win32 (I don't mean compatibility 
>functions, rather desktop integration - stock icons, workspace, etc.) 
>where GNOME or KDE was created for and fits the bill.

The goal of lazarus is to run on as much as possible GUIes so GNOME or KDE 
isn't enough. As you may have
seen fpc/powerpc gets working so a Lazarus for MacOS is possible for Aqua 
the desktop integration is
probably different.


></rant mode>
>
>Please don't react to the above points, they are only illustrative and I 
>don't want to start a flamewar on any of these points.

I'll react however :)


>The point is, we should always think about whether and how it is 
>implemented in the OS(es), and follow those practices, if possible. If we 
>need to change something, then ask lib/OS authors first, and only if they 
>don't understand our needs, only *then* duplicate their work. That's the 
>spirit of open source as I see it.
>
>And one day, perhaps, we will not see Lazarus executable 9MB large and 
>counting...