language selection in Windows

[Lubomir I. Ivanov]

On 18 June 2013 17:29, Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2013-06-17 at 16:14 +0300, Lubomir I. Ivanov wrote:
>> On 16 June 2013 12:55, Krzysztof Arentowicz <karent.bug at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > I was contacted by a user of Subsurface 3.1 who experienced a problem
>> > with language selection.
>> > He's running Windows 7x64 (Polish) on two of his machines, one
>> > Professional and one Home Premium. On the first one Subsurface correctly
>> > installed in Polish, on Home Premium it was in English.
>> > Of course he was unable to change the language.
>> >
>> > Setting language based on OS setting is fine in Linux but in Windows,
>> > where the user is most often tied to a single OS language version, it is
>> > generally expected by users to be able to able to choose language inside
>> > a given application.
>> >
>> > I think this would be sensible to include such functionality, at least
>> > in Windows version.
>> >
>> > Speaking from my own experience, I am also affected by this as one of my
>> > laptops is provided by my employer with English Windows version and I am
>> > unable to switch Subsurface to use my native language on that machine,
>> > even though it is supported.
>> >
>>
>> we can expose a --lang=xx_XX command line argument for Windows, where
>> xx_XX is one of the bundled languages.
>> here is a patch proposal, but i cannot test it as currently i cannot
>> compile on any OS. patch changes the initialization order in main.c,
>> so i doubt i got that right blindly.
>>
>> feel free to compile, modify, test, sign-off by yourself giving credit or not.
>>
>> later the NSIS installer can have the list of available languages,
>> where selection is made by the user and the .exe shortcuts can have
>> the argument included. the list part i do not know how to do,
>> honestly.
>
> I don't think I like this. Command line arguments in general are not
> user friendly at all. I'd much rather allow people to select the
> language from the preferences and then store that selection in the
> settings.
>

a UI preference is definitely better. it could use the locale language
until the user picks a new one from an #ifdef section of the settings
dialog, as this is only needed on Windows..
for that we have to grab the list of folder names in share/locale, but
the list may still look a bit weird without aliases. e.g. it_IT ->
Italian.

lubomir
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