RFC: Fixing kernel32:locale tests on Vista and higher

[Reece Dunn]

2009/8/30 James McKenzie <jjmckenzie51 at earthlink.net>:
> Greg Geldorp wrote:
>> From: James McKenzie [mailto:jjmckenzie51 at earthlink.net]
>>
>>> I would mark the tests broken for Vista and Windows7 but I would not
>>> eliminate them for Windows 2003 and lower.  Right now, the conformance
>>> is to WindowsXP SP3.  Do the tests work there?
>>>
>>
>> There are no failures at all on NT4/2000/XP/2003.
>>
>
> Thank you for the update.
>>
>>> Also, are we going to move from WindowsXP to Windows7 anytime soon?  We
>>> may have 'buy' time to get this fixed without using the tables from M$.
>>>
>>
>> For the record, they also fail on Vista/2008. I'd be surprised if Wine moved to defaulting to Win7 in the next year, but that's not my decision to make :-).
>>
>>
> Vista is something I hope goes away and soon.  Unfortunately, I will be
> stuck with using it in my workplace for a while until they get fed up
> with all of the complaints and move on to Windows 7.
>
> Is there anything we can do to make the tests pass without using M$
> tables?  Can we create tables of our own that will pass?

Does anyone understand what these are doing and (in a general sense)
what the changes to Vista are?

That leads to the question of whether Wine should be using the locale
rules for Windows, or for the system Wine is running on. Ideally, the
locale data should be taken from glibc (or the equivalent component
where locale data is stored).

That way, the tests should just be behavioural, not data, tests (that
is, pick a sample of data from different groups -- such as characters
that do compare equal and those that don't for case insensitive
comparison (with some that cover casing rules for accented
characters)).

I suppose the main questions to ask are:
  1/  are there applications that depend on the pre-Vista locale rules?
  2/  are the Linux/*BSD/Mac/OpenSolaris (or glibc, uLibc, ...) locale
rules *compatible* with Windows?

I haven't seen anything on the locale changes for Vista breaking
anything except the Wine tests. As a result, it should (in theory) be
possible to use the native version. This would then remove the need
for Wine to copy the Microsoft locale tables.

NOTE: If a system does not have the support for this, the existing
Wine (i.e. pre-Vista) version can still be used.

- Reece