[lazarus] Localization site

[Marco van de Voort]

> >> 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...
> >
> Wouldn't Cygwin help here?

Do you want to add 130 MB Cygwin to the 10 MB Lazarus?

> I belive gcc is for Windows as well, so it should be possible...

We already use cygwin _parts_, e.g. for the debugger. But it should be
as little as possible. Distributions are _huge_
 
> > 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. 
> 
> It does not work at the moment, both line and column determination.
> IMHO, it should be rooted away, or perhaps make this behaviour after a 
> switch (like fpc -h). It is the only app that does this, and it confuses 
> me as user...

Then your terminal is behaving badly. Are lines and columns variables set
correctly?

> > 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. 
> 
> But this sort of thing (i18n) is a lot of drudgery, noone seems to want 
> to do that and maintain that ...

Connecting to glibc is in practice also a can of worms. Note that glibc only
exists on Linux, Dos, Windows and OS/2 (afaik).  *BSD has an own libc, so
does Solaris etc.

> I believe you should use glibc for POSIX systems, and specific Win32 
> bindings for Windows, just like Lazarus does for Win32/GTK/Qt

Why ?  We can't even parse its headers. It would make porting even harder.

We now base the *nix ports directly on a POSIX interface (either kernel
interface, glue code for "special" operating systems, or libc (e.g. embedded
systems). This works very nice. I recently did the basic OpenBSD port in
two evenings.
 
> IIRC, glibc is present in MacOS X, too. For Win32, I would think glibc 
> from Cygwin project could be linked as well...

I would assume MacOS X to use FreeBSD's libc, since its userland is derived
from it.