[sldev] Projects that I'm working on (was: Philip's viewer)

[Henri Beauchamp]

On Sat, 11 Apr 2009 00:21:52 +0900, Alissa Sabre wrote:

Greetings,

> The following are my projects:
>
> .../...
> 
> * Better locale handling
> 
>   Rewriting locale (as in C setlocale() function) related workarounds
>   and problematic codes with a consistent and clean handling.  The
>   goal is to allow viewer to run under the user's locale in most
>   places, still maintaining locale independent data representation
>   stability whereever needed.
> 
>   The motivation is to eliminate recurring problems, e.g., VWR-12161,
>   VWR-11898, VWR-5365, VWR-5056, and pre-opensource issue SL-35450.
> 
>   I believe I have done 80-90% of required changes, but the viewer
>   still goes wild on German locale...

Please make sure that:

- the viewer will keep working properly on non-UTF-8 systems (using
  a French locale with ISO-8859-15 charset, here, and not going to
  switch to UTF-8 ever !).

- the locale used by the viewer can still be configured independantly
  from the system locale (i.e., I want to be able to run the viewer
  using the English locale, even though my system is configured for
  the French locale: I just can't stand the poor translations, and
  it's much easier for a merchant to use the most common locale for
  supporting their customers and guiding them through the menus).

- the date and numbers conventions parts of the locale can be kept
  separate from the locale chosen by the user. I.e., I don't want to
  have to use a comma instead of a decimal point for decimal numbers
  should I use the French locale, or be imposed a specific date format
  (see my patch proposal for https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-721
  about the latter issue).

> * Pango based text drawing  (VWR-10131)

Please, make sure that Pango usage can be disabled altogether if the
user does not need it (i.e. when the viewer runs on a system not
using UTF-8, but an 8 bits charset).
Pango is bloated and painfully slow. It would slow down needlessly
the viewer for people not needing the extended character sets brought
by UTF-8 (i.e. the large majority of the SL residents).
For an example of a wise usage of Pango, see Firefox (you can disable
Pango altogether in Firefox simply by setting MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1:
doing so makes the renderer fly at (well over) twice the speed you get
when Pango is enabled).

Regards,

Henri.