[systemd-devel] Dynamic locale changes with localed

[Tristan Van Berkom]

Hello Mailing List.

I have a quick question about the org.freedesktop.locale1 interface.

I've been working on some locale bound addressbook features for
Evolution Data Server, and we wanted a feature to handle locale
changes dynamically.

To handle this, we thought for starters it would be a good idea
to listen for 'Locale' property changes on the interface defined
here:
    http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/localed

This seems to work well but I've only tested receiving the
locale changes so far (using GTestDBus in an encapsulated
D-Bus environment... which we use in unit tests).

Now that we're trying this in a running system, we're
encountering some problems (or, the functionality is
perhaps just not exactly what we expected).

When calling the 'SetLocale' D-Bus method on the said
interface, there is some latency, and I wonder if the
values are policed somehow by the localed daemon (specifically,
when setting some locales, the following 'Locale' property
change notifications sends the 'C' locale instead of the
locale which we set).

Are there any constraints to what values are acceptable
to pass to 'SetLocale' ? Perhaps the locale data for a given
locale must be installed on the said system to be accepted
by (and then propagated) localed ?

Perhaps there is some latency only to synchronize the setting
into some database ?

Is there any information (or documentation) regarding how
the localed daemon is expected to work which could help us
test our dynamic locale changes ?

Best Regards,
    -Tristan