Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] On which platforms is there a need for Wireshark to have a "Language" preference

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Nov 6, 2014, at 5:58 AM, Alexis La Goutte <alexis.lagoutte@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> What the problem to have a setting for select language ?

It's One More Setting, and clutters the preferences GUI.

If the vast majority of users would always use their system-wide language setting, with the users who don't being, for example, developers working on translations, and there's a way to, for example, override it with an environment variable, perhaps that's sufficient.

If, however, a significant number of multilingual users run with a "mixed" environment, with some applications using one language for the UI and other using different languages, then a preference might make sense.

But, in the latter case, the broader question "why?" should be asked - what advantage does having some applications say "File" in the menu bar, with options such as "Open" under it, and others say "Fichier", with "Ouvrir" under it, at the same time, have over all applications saying "File/Open" or all applications saying "Fichier/Ouvrir"?  Is this because it's *inherently* useful, or is it just a workaround under some problem best fixed in some other fashion?

(I.e., "throw a user choice at it" should be treated as a last-resort solution to problems that cannot be easily solved in other, more automatic, fashions, not as the right solution to all problems.)

Speaking of a cluttered preference GUI:

	is there any reason *not* to "Remember main window size and placement"?

	is there any reason *not* to open files in the most recently used folder, at least on desktop environments where that's the default?

	is there any reason, on DEs that have a global "how many recent documents to keep in the Recent list" preference, to have a separate setting for that in Wireshark?

	what does "Automatically scroll packet details" do?  And what is the "Packet detail scroll percentage"?

	in DEs where there's a standard way to request whether to display a toolbar as icons, text, icons+text, such as Control+Click on the toolbar in OS X, is there any reason to have that in the preferences window?

	should we have a preference pane for columns, or should we have a "View" menu that lets the user select which columns to view, with a "Custom..." item that pops up a dialog to add a custom column to that list, and with re-ordering columns done by dragging columns?