KLocale host system integration

[John Layt]

Hi,

One topic I didn't get around to at Akademy was the situation with KDE not 
respecting the host system locale settings, so I'm spending the next couple of 
weeks working on KLocale to set up the infrastructure to to make this work 
properly.

The general concept is:
* When running under Win or Mac we should always use the host locale 
settings/services and ignore the KDE default and user settings, except where 
the host doesn't have an equivalent.  The user will be unable to override the 
host settings in the kcm, only the KDE unique settings.
* When running under *nix and a KDE desktop we will continue to use the KDE 
default and user settings/services as currently.
* When running under *nix but not a KDE desktop (Gnome/XFCE, etc) we should 
use the host locale settings/services as the default values (i.e. the POSIX 
locale files), but still allow the user to override all settings in KDE apps 
(as e.g. Gnome doesn't allow customization).  This is a lower priority for 
now.

The finer points are open to debate/revision, e.g. should we eventually switch 
even KDE desktop defaults to the POSIX ones where they exist and are 
appropriate?

My first step, making KLocale a fully private implementation and creating 
derived Windows/Mac locale classes is posted for review at 
http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/4683/ .

The next step will be to default the KDE country to the host system country so 
most users on all platforms will never need to visit the kcm and change any 
settings. The correct KDE default settings will almost always be picked up and 
be an acceptable substitute until the host system settings are actually used.

After that I will re-write the kcm to have a .ui based gui which disables 
options based on a config file, and improved usability so it's obvious where 
the user has over-ridden the default locale settings and make it easy to 
revert individual settings to the locale.  It will also improve handling the 
country setting, especially where the user has overridden the host system 
default.

Once those steps are in place we can progressively migrate each settings group 
on each platform with hopefully the minimum problems.

Cheers!

John.