[Xmonad] xmonad localisation

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

mats:
> Hello list,
> 
> I have some small patches as well as some questions regarding
> localisation of xmonad, I'm sorry if this runs a little long.
> 
> Attached is a patch to rewrite David Roundy's NamedWindow using
> getTextProperty and wcTextPropertyToTextList, which makes it aware of
> the user's locale. I couldn't find these functions in the existing X11
> bindings or in X11-extra so I have attached a second patch for
> X11-extras that adds them as well as the the TextProperty structure.
> 
> To make these patches do anything useful, xmonad also needs to call
> setlocale at some point. It is natural to do this first thing in main,
> and it is trivial to add except I don't think setlocale or the category
> constants are in the standard libraries, so the ffi and hsc2hs or
> similar is needed.
> 
> In fact, applying these patches without calling setlocale will stop
> some titles that are now fetched correctly from working, namely those
> that are in ISO-8859-1 but not ASCII, in effect setting the locale to
> C, so don't do that. Note also that the patch assumes wchar_t =
> Data.Char, i.e. that withCWString works correctly. This is often true
> (always in glibc, I think) but not by any means guaranteed. Another
> choice would be to use XmbTextPropertyToTextList and keep the title as
> an opaque byte array. This is nice as long as you don't need to
> interpret it as a string at which point you need something like iconv.
> 
> In addition to this, everything that displays text needs to be changed
> to be locale-aware. This applies to xmonad itself when it prints log
> messages to stderr without encoding them, but maybe this isn't such a
> pressing issue to address as it is intended for debugging. More
> important are extensions that draw text, window titles in particular. I
> think these should be changed to use X(mb/wc)DrawString, xft, pango or
> some other locale-aware method.
> 
> I have some patches that modify David Roundy's Decoration and Tabbed
> modules to use a small xft binding I made, here's a screen shot:
> 
> http://www.mdstud.chalmers.se/~jansborg/screenshot.png
> 
> I have used these for a couple of days now and they seem to work, but
> I don't propose to apply them for several reasons:
>  * they break anything using Decoration
>  * they introduce a dependency on xft which clearly shouldn't be a
>    hard requirement for building xmonad
>  * some people don't like anti-aliasing, I tend to agree at small
>    resolutions/font sizes
> 
> If there's interest I can post them anyway for people to play with.
> 
> How is the the organisation of xmonad supposed to account for extensions
> such as these that need to be linked with additional libraries? It seems
> any such extensions must patch not only XMonadContrib but also core
> xmonad to account for the build process, or is there some way around
> this?

That's correct. Another option would be for contributed extensions to
state which 3rd party libraries should be added to the .cabal file
(manually).

Regarding localisation, I think you should make a feature request for
this, with the arguments for it, and a link to the patch.

-- Don