[AD] About get_config_text and it's actual problems

[Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz <gradha@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi.

I am not sending a bug report about the problem I had with
get_config_text, because the problem was not having updated the local
allegro.cfg file of my game, which didn't have the language variable in a
system section. 

But I have found another problem with the current system, and it's that
there's no easy way to switch languages at run time. I have tried the
following example which attempted to print the same get_config_text string
in different languages, and it works, but it's unpretty:

#include <allegro.h>

void _load_config_text ();

int main (void)
{
   char buf[256];
   install_allegro (SYSTEM_NONE, &errno, atexit);
   /* This code will successfully reload language especifications for
    * english (it's not my default language, so I see a difference :-)) */
   set_config_string ("system", "language", "en");
   _load_config_text(); /* However this uses a private call */
   allegro_message ("English message: %s\n", get_config_text ("Cancel"));

   /* Now the following does the trick, setting a global public config
    * file which can be modified by Allegro, but also read from */
   set_config_file ("estext.cfg");
   allegro_message ("Spanish message: %s\n", get_config_text ("Cancel"));

   /* Finally, this does the same, but shows how detext.cfg would be
    * modified, which is _bad_, especially if the allegro-user is expecting
    * to save it's other variables to whatever.cfg and they end up in the
    * language file. */
   set_config_file ("detext.cfg");
   allegro_message ("German message: %s\n", get_config_text ("Cancel"));
   set_config_string ("test", "test", "test");

   /* At this exit point, detext.cfg _is_ modified */
   return 0;
}
END_OF_MAIN();

The example is self explanatory: unless I've overlooked some other
function, there's no easy way to change languages without completely
shutting down allegro to reinitialize it or calling a private function,
which is used by allegro _only_ in install_allegro. And calling
install_allegro several times doesn't look very good, especially because
the function may change the system_driver variable. I don't know what
consequences may have that, but doesn't look good. 

The only way I found to change language was using an external .cfg file,
but then all the config variables will be written to this file, as shown
with the last set_config_string of the example.

Therefore, unless someone shows a simple way to switch languages at run
time, I would like to propose the following patch, which just makes
_load_config_text public as reload_config_texts. Thanks to this function
Allegro can update the needed internal variables without touching anything
else, and I think it looks much better than patching install_allegro. 

--
 Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz   gradha@xxxxxxxxxx   http://gradha.infierno.org

Attachment: language_patch.gz
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