i18n architecture question, ICU related

Michael Dexter wrote:
> 
> Does anyone know if consideration was given to using
PyICU, the 
> python wrapper to ICU for use in Zope3 and in turn
Plone?
> 
> http://pyicu.osafound
ation.org/
> 
> Any insights as to why or why not?

The reason is quite simple. PyICU wasn't around at the time
Zope's
i18n/locale support has been written ;) The i18n/l10n parts
of Zope3 are
almost all about four years old now and havn't changed much
in this time.

You might find some insights at
http://lists.osafoundation.org/piper
mail/chandler-dev/2005-April/002662.html
for example where the OSAF was evaluating zope.locales as a
candidate
for getting access to the ICU data. They turned this down,
mainly
because zope.locales does not provide all of ICU but only
the
information found in the XML files. If you look at
http://leilani.osafounda
tion.org/~bkirsch/i18n/ChandlerInternationalizationProposal.
html
you find a lot of information how OSAF is using PyICU.

In the mid-term run I think it would be a good idea to look
into
replacing Zope's own approach with PyICU, but this is quite
a heavy task
and as long as there's nobody interested in it, it won't
happen.

Right now the direction Zope3 takes is to use some different
libraries
for the additional features ICU would provide as well. I
think there's
both more advanced timezone support through pytz and I have
seen some
collation (locale depend string sorting and comparison) work
done by Jim
Fulton.

If you have a project (read time or money ;) that needs
additional ICU
features I'm quite certain the Zope3 folks would be glad to
see a
proposal for including PyICU into Zope3 (and somebody
implementing it of
course ;).

Hanno



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Hanno Schlichting wrote:
> 
> Right now the direction Zope3 takes is to use some
different libraries
> for the additional features ICU would provide as well.
I think there's
> both more advanced timezone support through pytz and I
have seen some
> collation (locale depend string sorting and comparison)
work done by Jim
> Fulton.

I need to correct myself here. The zope.ucol package (found
here:
svn://svn.zope.org/repos/main/zope.ucol/trunk) is just a
simple wrapper
around the ICU library (which you have to have installed
separately).
Writing more wrappers for the missing ICU features following
this
example shouldn't be too hard if you are used to write
Python C wrapper
modules. Even Jim used Pyrex in this case, which should make
writing
these wrappers a lot more easier ;)

Hanno



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