Why are there locale troubles under Windows?

**OmegaJunior** · Feb 17 '07, 09:35 AM

Re: Why are there locale troubles under Windows?

On Sat, 17 Feb 2007 00:03:34 +0100, Daniele C.
<legolas558@use rs.sourceforge. netwrote:

I will report a snippet from http://php.net/setlocale
>

>Warning
>>
>The locale information is maintained per process, not per thread. If
>you are running PHP on a multithreaded server api like IIS or Apache on
>Windows you may experience sudden changes of locale settings while a
>script is running although the script itself never called setlocale()
>itself. This happens due to other scripts running in different threads
>of the same process at the same time changing the processwide locale
>using setlocale().
>>

>
I spent about 2 seconds before thinking: can it really be? I mean, is
there no way to set locale info per thread? And after a brief web
search I came up with this keyword: _configthreadlo cale
>
Read more at
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...7x(VS.80).aspx
(beware, this page is very slow or their servers are anyway).
Looks like this function exists since Windows 95 and guess what it
does: it affects the behaviour of the locale functions so that _each
thread will have indipendent locale settings_.
>
So, I though: WHY? Why does not PHP use such function in the win32
binding?
>
Let's be clear, I don't think to have found a solution that PHP
developers could not find, but I would like to know why they did not
fix the bad behaviour of PHP's setlocale() function using the
configthreadloc ale() win32 function, there must be some reason I
really could not think about up to now.
>
I really hope somebody can point me to something to read about this
topic (I found pretty nothing up to now) or better directly explain it
to me.
>
Thank you
--
Daniele C.
>

How is PHP supposed to react when someone on the server changes the locale
settings while services are running? Do you expect the PHP language to
retain every possible OS setting in memory? That could be doable, but what
if the setting needed to be changed? And PHP keeps running with an
outdated setting because it cached it? No. Better to read it from the OS
every time it's needed. Yes, that will make it possible for things to
change during script execution. And if your scripts are locale-aware, you
should already have programmed that possibility into your scripts.

You can compare it to the time setting. If the server admin decides to
change the time on the server, it may happen in between executions of
script. That means the first execution has the old time, while the next
has the new time. Is this a problem? Not in most applications. But it is
in time-depending ones. And those should already have taken that
possibility into account.

--
Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/

**Daniele C.** · Feb 17 '07, 04:15 PM

Re: Why are there locale troubles under Windows?

On Feb 17, 10:19 am, OmegaJunior <omegajun...@sp amremove.home.n l>
wrote:

On Sat, 17 Feb 2007 00:03:34 +0100, Daniele C.
>
>
>
<legolas...@use rs.sourceforge. netwrote:

I will report a snippet fromhttp://php.net/setlocale

>

Warning

>

The locale information is maintained per process, not per thread. If
you are running PHP on a multithreaded server api like IIS or Apache on
Windows you may experience sudden changes of locale settings while a
script is running although the script itself never called setlocale()
itself. This happens due to other scripts running in different threads
of the same process at the same time changing the processwide locale
using setlocale().

>

I spent about 2 seconds before thinking: can it really be? I mean, is
there no way to set locale info per thread? And after a brief web
search I came up with this keyword: _configthreadlo cale

>

Read more at
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...7x(VS.80).aspx
(beware, this page is very slow or their servers are anyway).
Looks like this function exists since Windows 95 and guess what it
does: it affects the behaviour of the locale functions so that _each
thread will have indipendent locale settings_.

>

So, I though: WHY? Why does not PHP use such function in the win32
binding?

>

Let's be clear, I don't think to have found a solution that PHP
developers could not find, but I would like to know why they did not
fix the bad behaviour of PHP's setlocale() function using the
configthreadloc ale() win32 function, there must be some reason I
really could not think about up to now.

>

I really hope somebody can point me to something to read about this
topic (I found pretty nothing up to now) or better directly explain it
to me.

>

Thank you
--
Daniele C.

>
How is PHP supposed to react when someone on the server changes the locale
settings while services are running? Do you expect the PHP language to
retain every possible OS setting in memory? That could be doable, but what
if the setting needed to be changed? And PHP keeps running with an
outdated setting because it cached it? No. Better to read it from the OS
every time it's needed. Yes, that will make it possible for things to
change during script execution. And if your scripts are locale-aware, you
should already have programmed that possibility into your scripts.
>
You can compare it to the time setting. If the server admin decides to
change the time on the server, it may happen in between executions of
script. That means the first execution has the old time, while the next
has the new time. Is this a problem? Not in most applications. But it is
in time-depending ones. And those should already have taken that
possibility into account.
>

You can already change the _process-wide_ (I remark, process wide and
not relative to the single thread of the client request) locale
settings using setlocale(), so the current behaviour is even worse
than what the developer should expect (theorically, mixed locale
output can happen if a thread changes the locale while another thread
had previously started and asked for a specific locale through
setlocale()).
You say that the developer should take in account such possibility,
however considering that the OS allows an implementation (using
_configthreadlo cale()) I am asking why in PHP it is not implemented
(code and data structures, of course) so that things would be done the
right way?
And why are you saying that PHP should keep the OS locale settings in
memory? I don't understand that, PHP would still be querying the OS
for locales available BUT the behaviour of all the locale functions
would be bound to the single thread instead. Reading the MSDN page I
understood that using _configthreadlo cale() no particular trickery is
needed and you can just use the locale POSIX functions as usual.
Locale settings would be stored per-thread, of course, simple logic
suggests it, but it would be transparent and I am really sure that the
memory overhead (I guess less than a few KBs, so irrelevant!) is worth
having a consistent PHP function behaviour.
As you brought the example of the time changing issue, I feel like you
did not understand my question, or otherwise I totally missed out your
point, in such case please excuse me and better explain me what you
are saying.

Anyway, thanks for answering! Seems like nobody has the knowledge/will
to answer.

Regards,
--
Daniele C.

Why are there locale troubles under Windows?

Why are there locale troubles under Windows?

Comment

Comment