Monday, January 28, 2008

Suggestions for improving a message

Today speaking with fellow KDE devels we realized some of them had the region set to the default C region, that basically means something like USA region but not completely, so not something you want when living not in USA.

Currently the name for that text entry for that is "Default", that may lead to problems as you might think the "Default" region is the correct, but it most probably is not. Some people suggested to switch to "Not Set" which is not completely accurate as it is set to C region, but will probably help "non-purist" users to set the correct Region. Other options go through "Default (Not Set)" or "Not Set (C Region)", etc.

So i'm asking the wider audience here, what would you think it would be the better wording?

To see it live go to systemsettings->Regional & Language, choose "Country/Region & Language" option on the left bar and "Country or Region: YourCurrentRegion (change...)" is what we are talking about.
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7 comments:

  1. AnonymousMonday, January 28, 2008 10:48:00 PM

    I think that the OS should give these details to KDEs regional settings. A user shouldnt have to manually set this. When they install they set it to eg South Africa. Then eg Kubuntu sets up the date&time, apt sources file. It should set the KDE regional options too.

    What you think?

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  2. UnknownMonday, January 28, 2008 11:13:00 PM

    GNU libc has a brief description of the C locale:
    http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Standard-Locales.html

    So perhaps something like:
    POSIX standard (ISO C)

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  3. AnonymousMonday, January 28, 2008 11:53:00 PM

    And maybe "Generic english"?

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  4. Kevin KoflerTuesday, January 29, 2008 1:52:00 AM

    "Legacy default locale"? The rationale being that even US users shouldn't be using C these days, but en_US.UTF-8.

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  5. AnonymousTuesday, January 29, 2008 2:31:00 AM

    "Not set (Generic English)" is the safest bet I suppose (though lengthy), just to be picky. Personally I'd prefer the only "Not set" flag, which would be false, but not contradicting; it would only make the user think it hasn't ben set yet, so the system had default to whatever the default locale is, which usually is english.
    "C" seems comprehensible only to power users, and I would avoid it totally; power users use the terminal and know they have to env|grep LC to find out the real settings.

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  6. AnonymousTuesday, January 29, 2008 7:18:00 AM

    What about;
    "Unknown location"
    notice that I don't use 'locale' (which is not unknown ;).

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  7. AnonymousTuesday, January 29, 2008 10:38:00 AM

    "not set" is technically false, so don't include it.

    "generic (english)" or "non-specific (english)" sound about right to me.

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