Re: [Qemu-devel] QEMU produces invalid JSON due to locale-dependent code

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 08:46:35AM +0200, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>   Hi,
> 
> > > It seems the only thing that we really care about being localized is
> > > the messages catalogue, so the GTK UI gets internationalization in
> > > its menus / dialogs / etc. As such I think that we should do the
> > > opposite of (C). ie run every LC_* in the C locale, except for
> > > LC_MESSAGES which we allow to be localized.
> > > 
> > > This avoids any unpredictable functional consequences (like number
> > > formatting) while still giving user decent localization in the UI
> > 
> > Except that the LC_MESSAGES catalog may include messages such as "blah
> > %d blah" that get translated for use as a printf argument, and the lack
> > of matching LC_NUMERIC will make the translation look wrong.
> > Translators often assume that their translation is being used with
> > everything else about the locale matching the locale of the translation.
> 
> I don't think this is a big issue in practice.  The menu item names are
> pretty much the only thing translated in the qemu gtk ui ...

Also we're talking about a tradeoff between functionally incorrect
formatting of JSON, vs "wrong looking" translations with no functional
impact, which probably won't even affect QEMU in reality.

In terms of minimizing hacks to QEMU, it seems like only localizing
LC_MESSAGES is a simple enough tradeoff to avoid functionally
incorrect behaviour with minimal downside and no code complexity
messing around with thread-locales, etc

Regards,
Daniel
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