wxApp::Initialize() setting the locale? [wxGTK 2.8.0]

[Vadim Zeitlin]

[redirected to wx-dev from wx-users as it seems more appropriate]

On Tue, 27 Feb 2007 13:28:36 -0400 Ian Britten <britten at caris.com> wrote:

IB> After some debugging/digging, I noticed that wxApp::Initialize() (wxGTK)
IB> explicitely calls gtk_set_locale(), setting the program locale to be
IB> the same as the users current settings.

 For the reference, this call was added by Robert 8.5 years ago in revision
1.13 of src/gtk/window.cpp with the following commit message:

Added support for non-european fonts and X extension using gtk_set_locale()
 
So apparently it is needed to use i18n with GTK+ at all and so it seems
like a good idea to have it.

IB> Given that large amounts of our code is currently not ready for a
IB> wholesale locale switch, I'm unsure how to proceed... I can't
IB> currently support foreign locales, and if the user has switched their
IB> locale, I know that the app won't work correctly.

 I do see your point as well though.

IB> If I try to work around this (by trying to set the locale back to C),
IB> how much of the wx subsystem will be left in the 'other' locale?
IB> Can it be reset/switched?

 I think this is going to result in problems.

IB> Finally, can anyone clarify the behaviour of wxMSW?  Obviously there's
IB> no call to gtk_set_locale() in there, but I didn't see anything that
IB> seems to be setting the locale.  Does this mean that wxMSW behaves
IB> differently than wxGTK?  (Sorry, I'm not familiar with Windows, and
IB> don't have a Windows box to test on...)

 Yes, wxMSW doesn't change the locale and it's indeed an inconsistency
between ports and so is a bad thing. However my way of solving it would be
to add setlocale(LC_ALL, "") call to wxMSW startup code somewhere rather
than removing gtk_set_locale() from wxGTK.

 But as I wrote above, I realize that some applications may not want to
change locale at all. So ideally we should provide a possibility to avoid
this even though I think it should still be done by default. The simplest
way to allow for it would be to add a virtual wxApp SetLocale() function
which would be called from OnInit() and could be overridden by the user
code to do nothing.

 What do you think?
VZ