[haiku] Re: [gsoc] Request for application pre-review

Hi Michael,

Michael Bridgers <michaelbridgers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[ICU]
> Now, with that said, I think there are a LOT of areas that need work 
> for
> Haiku to be fully internationalized. Here is a list of the main areas
> where Haiku is missing support:
> 
> - Right-to-left (RTL) layout of windows
> - RTL UI components (such as scrolling lists, combo boxes, etc)

This is something that could be done without too many hassles in the 
layout kit, I would think.

> - Fonts for more languages
> - Resource bundles for localization

How that would work is not yet determined completely.

> - Encoding conversion

That's already supported in Haiku by libtextencoding.so (via 
libiconv.so).

> - Linguistic collation
> - Locale sensitive date/time, calendars, etc...
> - Locale sensitive number formatting and parsing

This is something OpenTracker's locale kit is already doing, though not 
for many languages.
You even left out one important thing (that is also supported by ICU, 
but maybe "text boundary detection" falls under this category): Unicode 
character functions like isalpha(), tolower(), etc. This is already 
supported by our kit with the powers of ICU (it uses its tool to 
generate the data, back then, its license was not as permissive, so I 
need to rewrite the code that loaded the data) :-)

> Haiku has resources, but they aren't up to the task of easily 
> supporting
> localization of applications and the OS.

The base localization techniques aren't so hard to implement - what's 
really a lot of work is supporting all those languages. In any case I 
agree that using ICU as the basis is a good idea that should be 
pursued.
I just would still prefer a nice C++ API (that blends in nicely with 
the rest of the Haiku API) instead of what ICU provides, even if it 
would be a wrapper in many cases. Also the on-disk layout would need to 
comply to Haiku's standards, not that of Unix.

> I currently working out an approach to using the resource bundle 
> support
> in ICU to provide support for localizing both Haiku applications and 
> the
> OS itself.  I am planning to provide articles describing this 
> (including
> example code) and other features of ICU.

This might be something where a Haiku specific solution is more 
appropriate, but knowing the details would certainly help.

Bye,
   Axel.

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