OpenBSD Journal

Locale Capability

Contributed by jose on from the around-the-world dept.

Jungh contributes this article for those who use OpenBSD around the world:
"recently JFCh tried to port FreeBSD's locale support into OpenBSD's libc. It provides collating according to LC_* environment, wide chars, etc, etc.

The diff is against CVS sources from jan.22 2003. All patches & binaries are located at http://www.benhur.prf.cuni.cz/wydobitki/openbsd/locale/ and has used it succesfully with national language sort in postgresql. The original work is mentioned in a mail to the tech@ list

Also, Jung tried to port NetBSD's locale support to OpenBSD in Nov, 2002. He has posted a screenshot here for you to see."

This is pretty cool, I know some people are using other BSD systems because getting the correct characters and locale information is not in the base system. The project has no plans at this time to support changing the locale of the system due to the various difficulties it would incur in a variety of systems, but from time to time OpenBSD enthusists from around the world make some updates.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Jeffrey () on

    The only other thing we need is a complete wide character implementation (part of it is there IIRC) and iconv()...

    Big Note! I'm _not_ complaining in any way.
    Yes, there is libiconv in ports of course...
    I wish I knew enough to help with these things.

  2. By Too lazy to get an account () on

    I understand that localization is important -- those who need it, need it. I applaud this work.

    However, I'm hoping that as real localization makes it into releases that it remains simple to side-step it and default to the plain ole C locale.

    I've just been bitten in the ass too many times by internationalization issues during compilation and setup on Linux and FreeBSD that I just do my best stay clear of most i18n stuff as much as I can.

    I claim extreme ignorance of the greater picture, and the differences between i18n and l10n. All I do is look for the "switch" to turn it off, always. As long as I can find that switch, and find a way to tape it down, I'll be happy.

    Either that, or it becomes so complete and stable that I can truly run with the en-CA locale as default without breakage.

    Only because I can, "G". Only because I can.

  3. By mirabile () mirabile@bsdcow.net on mailto:mirabile@bsdcow.net

    There are quite some reasons why locale sucks.
    I dont need more than native utf-8 support;
    I don't want to be surprised by, say french
    error messages (and the German message catalogues
    look weird to a native speaker, too...)

    IF you want it, make it optional, that's all I
    demand (mk.conf option like KERBEROS5=no would
    be fine)...

  4. By Anonymous Coward () on

    Computers are designed to speak English and nothing else. And no, I'm not a native speaker. In my former life when I did support and people called and had problem with their Word program and they had a Swedish or Finnish Windows it just made life so much more difficult. Especially when the translations are not always that good.
    But before anyone flames me I do understand the need for locales. Personally I just don't want them :-).

  5. By Anonymous Coward () on

    MicroBSD had locale support 1000 years before OpenBSD ever di ... errr, never mind.

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