[spambayes-dev] Config files and locale

[Mark Hammond]

> > Even in this perfect world, we have the same issue:  If we 
> > ever want to ship a config file containing floats, we must 
> > agree on either periods or commas as the decimal.  If we do 
> > that, we prevent the user entering numbers using their 
> > regional settings, if that differs from what we decide.
> 
> As another option, what about requiring a leading option if the locale
> is not 'en'.  For example:
> """
> [globals]
> config_language: german
> [Categorization]
> spam_cutoff: 0,10
> """

In my example of shipping config files with floats, it doesn't help too
much.  If the user adds such an option, they will also need to modify every
existing float first - and the penalties of not doing so can be subtle - eg
yesterday, I watched my cutoff scores get successively multipled by 100 each
time the config file was loaded and saved (which is just a side effect of
mismatched locales and the absurd conversions we saw yesterday)

Mark.
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