Scratch localization.

[John Maloney]

Hi, Erik.

Apologies for the delay in responding. I was on vacation, then  
finishing the Scratch 1.3 release.

Scratch remembers the last language set by the user in the Scratch.ini  
file. If that file is read-only, it fails gracefully.

In older versions of Scratch (such as the current XO version), if no  
language was specified in the Scratch.ini file, Scratch would start up  
in English. However, it now uses the Squeak LocalePlugin to set the  
default language. So if the computer's locale is set to Spanish,  
Scratch should start up in Spanish. This feature has not yet been  
tested on Linux, but it does work on Mac OS and Windows.

Many thanks to the Squeak folks for creating the LocalePlugin!

So I think things may work fine as they are, once we've updated XO  
Scratch to the 1.3 release. (I'm working on that now, with help from  
Scott if he is willing).

Scratch does not need to write persistent data to any other files.

(It does need to write user projects somewhere, but Scott has solved  
that problem for now.)

	-- John


On Aug 27, 2008, at 1:00 PM, Erik Garrison wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 06:54:18PM +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>>
>> Am 27.08.2008 um 18:38 schrieb C. Scott Ananian:
>>
>>> Scratch appears to require manual editing of the Scratch.ini file in
>>> order to come up in a language other than English.  Is there any  
>>> way I
>>> can pass a command-line option in bin/scratch-activity to set the
>>> Language preference based on the value of $LANG?  I'd prefer that we
>>> not have to ship a different Scratch bundle per-country.
>>
>> The Right Way to do it would be using the LocalePlugin, as Etoys  
>> does.
>>
>> If you need to patch up the bundle you could use the symlink trick
>> again, the actual Scratch.ini would live in data/. Thus the language
>> (and other settings possibly) that the user choses would persist.  
>> When
>> running for the first time, the startup script could generate an
>> initial Scratch.ini for the right language.
>
> What other persistent data beyond Scratch.ini does Scratch like to
> modify?