Re: Localization and pspp on MSWindows

[John Darrington]

On Fri, Feb 06, 2009 at 09:57:20AM +0100, unknown-1 wrote:

     >     What I need is something so I can see what the NLS settings are in
     > PSPPIRE
     >     when it runs on mswindows. Is this possible?
     >
     > Perhaps some diagnostic features could be added.  What settings do you
     > need to know?
     
     
     The LANG settings. Like "en_GB,UTF-8". If this doesn't give a clue the
     directory where psppire looks for the .po files.

It's not so simple the locale settings are divided into categories.
The most obvious category is LC_MESSAGES.   So to determine in which
language messages will appear, the environment variables LANG,
LC_MESSAGES and LC_ALL will be used.   See the man page for
setlocale(3)

However to avoid problems with formatting, sorting and other things, pspp does
not set any locale category other than LC_MESSAGES.  This means that
nuances of a locale might not be observered.  For example, numbers in
an error message might not appear how a European would expect.   I
consider this a bug which I'd like to fix soon (hence my comments
about newlocale/uselocale).

A further complication arises because spss has a SET OLANG command
(which we should also support) to set the locale of the output
file. Thus, the language of the user interface could be distinct from
that of the output (and, in turn, the input file(s) could use
character set encodings which are distinct from both the user
interface and the output file).

Po files are source files.  They are not installed, but are "compiled"
into .mo files which are installed into ${prefix}/<locale>/LC_MESSAGES

     Further the directory where the "psppire.txt" will be written.
     

Again it get's a bit tricky.  Pspp can have several "drivers", so as
to produce text, html, postscript and potentially other kinds of
output.  And any running instance of pspp can have an unlimited number
of drivers concurrently.   Ben is working on a revamped version of the
output system which (from what I understand) will comprise a pipeline
of postprocessing filters to transform what pspp generates into
whatever the user wants.  In either system, anything to guess the
location of the output file will likely circumvent the internal
workings and be unreliable.

Sorry to be so evasive.  I'm still a bit unsure of your motive for
wanting these things.  If I understood that better, then perhaps I'd
be able to provide a more helpfull response.

J'

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