[luatex] Localisation of Lua or LuaTeX

[luigi scarso]

On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 9:12 AM, Ralf Meyer <rameyer at uni-math.gwdg.de> wrote:

> Dear Luigi,
>
> it was as you expected: on my system,
> os.setlocale("de_DE.utf8")
> has the required effect, thanks.
>
> It is remarkable that the names of locales are so system dependent.
> Even more disturbing, the shell command "locale -a" showed me that my
> computer only knows about several German and English locales.
>
> Hence a french luatex document a colleague sends me will not work on my
> computer because it lacks the necessary locales, and probably my
> documents will not work on his computer for the same reason.  This is
> really bad news!  One of the great things about TeX is portability.
>
> Should one refrain from using the os library, or at least its
> localisation aspects, and warn users to avoid it for this reason?
> Should one reimplement the localisation libraries that os.setlocale is
> calling in luatex itself, so that users can rely on a common framework
> all over the world?
>
Every os.* is, of course, os dependant. I have a linux box that has 19
locales, another one that has 731..Of course
Windows and MacOS have their locale setup too.

It's a matter of robust programming then: for simple things for example
maybe this is ok
if os.setlocale("<your string>") == nil then
 if os.setlocale("<another try 1>") == nil then
  if os.setlocale("<another try 2>") == nil then
   ..
 end
 end
end
but locale is a huge .. and you reinvent the wheel.
A common framework is icu : just jump to
http://site.icu-project.org/home
and see how much complex localization+encoding can be.


About portability: even with tex (I mean the Knuth tex, not etex or pdftex
or luatex) the same source can
give very different results if you use only a slightly different version of
the same metafont font (given that we use the same frozen  tex version, of
course). So the same result is a matter of the same boundary conditions.
Things doen't change much with luatex, we have more  boundary conditions
than before --- but with lua we  have much more power than before and hence
we need more control.

-- 
luigi
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