Hi, With the countdown to Plasma Next underway, I thought I'd better outline what needs to be done for locale settings, in particular the KCM, in case I don't find the time to do it.
In KDE4 we had KLocale in which we wrote the formatting code and provided the locale data ourselves which gave our users the ability to override every single locale setting in the Locale KCM, but completely failed to apply those settings to apps written with Qt or Gtk or anything else that also ran under Plasma. It also meant KDE apps running under other workspaces, such as Gnome or Unity, sometimes failed to respect the host locale settings and used the KDE settings instead. We also had separate settings for country and language rather than the more standard locale code of country and language combined, which while being more user-friendly didn't integrate well when talking to the outside world that was using only standard locale codes. In KF5 we have switched to QLocale to remove the heavy dependency for KF5 users and to better integrate with Qt apps and the host workspace. I've been working on bringing QLocale up to scratch, but it doesn't yet have the ability to load and use the custom KDE settings when running under Plasma Next, it will only use the standard POSIX envvars. This means that any changes made in the existing Locale KCM will be applied to KDE4 apps only, not KF5 apps that have removed the kde4support version of KLocale. We need to decide the best way to deal with this. What we can do in Plasma Next is allow users to separately choose which locale code to apply for each of the standard unix envars (LC_ALL, LC_NUMERIC, LC_TIME, LC_MONETARY, LC_MESSAGES, LC_MEASUREMENT, LANG), and have these apply to *all* apps running under Plasma Next by having kdeinit set them at start- up. But how do we present that in a usable way in a KCM, and what do we do with the KDE4 settings and KCM? For KDE4 apps running under Plasma Next, I wonder if it will be too confusing having them using different locale settings than the KF5 apps? Perhaps on migrating from KDE4 to Plasma Next we delete any old user locale settings in kdeglobals and as a consequence the apps will use the same settings as all other apps under Plasma Next? If we do keep the old settings, then we will probably also need to keep the old KCM available. For the new Locale KCM we will need to remove the separate Numbers, Money, Calendar, Date & Time and Other tabs for now. I'd suggest we no longer refer to the "Languages" tab but call it "Translations" instead, as that is what they really are, it configures how KLocalizedString works. Referring to them as Languages has created a lot of confusion, as has the current gui, but I'm not sure how to make it better. I'd also suggest changing the "Country" tab to "Formats", with a series of combo boxes to select the "Number Format", "Money Format", etc. We may be able to merge the Formats and Translations tabs into one layout but I suspect that will be too crowded, so instead perhaps we should have them as separate KCMs so they appear listed separately in the System Settings Locale group and sidebar as Formats, Translations, and Spell-Checker. One question is when these changes to the envvars will get applied, and the action required to apply them to the apps. I believe Gnome forces you to log out and in again before the new envvars are applied. In KDE4 you could simply restart individual apps, but to update Plasma itself you had to log out and in. Do we update the envars as soon as the KCM changes are saved, which would allow apps to simply be restarted, or would that be considered dangerous for running apps that assume the envvars won't change, e.g. would something like glibc immediately pick up the change and return inconsistent results? I guess another obvious question is where to save the envvar settings, I guess kdeglobals still? Or somewhere new? Longer term we will need to restore the ability to edit the individual settings and I have a roadmap for that, but I'm expecting some negative user feedback in the meantime :-) Cheers! John. _______________________________________________ Plasma-devel mailing list Plasma-devel@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
