Le Sun, 14 Feb 2010 19:40:27 +0100, Travis D. Reed <tdreed@xxxxxxxxx> a écrit:
I'm discovering that there are many interesting functions available in ICU. I'm somewhat confused as to the relationship between ICU and the LocaleKit.Is LocaleKit more or less a wrapper around ICU?If so, there are a lot of features in ICU (such as formatting plurals) thatcould be bundled into BString (that would be ubercool) or perhaps some auxillary class (like BStringBuilder). PulkoMandy, could you explain the relationship between ICU and LocaleKit?
Sure. Basically, the Locale Kit is split in 2 parts :The catalog API is an homegrown one since ICU doesn't provide any support for that.
Everything else is only wrappping around ICU. As of now, this second part is very incomplete : there are some drafts for an API but most of it is still stubs. Some other parts aren't even drafted. The idea is to have a clean API integrated into the system, so the Locale Kit uses BStrings and BMessages instead of arrays of char*. There is quite a lot of requests on the locale kit team now, and I'm still the only one looking at these requests. Unfortunately, I don't have as much free time as I would need to get all of it done. And as I'm still unable to access the internet from Haiku, my motivation isn't as high as it could be.
As for why we don't expose ICU to apps directly : this would be simpler, but updating ICU would create an API breakage and apps working on R1 wouldn't work anymore on R2 (or this may happen at a later revision). But designing a stable API from the ground up isn't easy either...
-- Adrien Destugues / PulkoMandy http://pulkomandy.ath.cx
