[fpc-devel] Locale solution for Linux (and maybe *nix)

[Marco van de Voort]

> On Mon, 4 Aug 2008, Marco van de Voort wrote:
> 
> > > it at once in the sysutils unit :-)
> > 
> > Why that? What is the problem with clocale?
> 
> The Libc dependency. Sysutils is used in a lot of small programs which
> do not necessarily depend on Libc. Having a locale available for these
> without pulling in libc would be a big plus in my eyes.

It will inflate the size, but worse it will make these little applications
vulnerable for bugs in the reading of these files, even if they don't use
the locale info. These kind of things are simply more sensitive on *nix.

But since we know the libc interface is also not always stable, it might be
good to have a choice. But please if you do implement this, keep it plugin
style to keep choice, and avoid adding a dangerous dependancy to programs
that don't use it.
 
> If we can have a routine that parses the locale file, we can add it to
> sysutils or as a plugin unit, whatever. To have separate widestring
> managers and thread managers would also be a good thing (tm).

Yes, in time we'll need an own implementation of a (limited) widestring
manager. Actually the unit charset already is a bit of a core for this (it
converts codepages over unicode to other codepages).