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Re: non-ASCII characters in /etc/locales.alias ?



At 16 Jan 2002 15:41:55 +0000,
Alastair McKinstry wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-01-16 at 14:54, David Starner wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 16, 2002 at 01:48:46PM +0000, Alastair McKinstry wrote:
> > > 	bokmål		no_NO.ISO-8859-1
> > > 	français	fr_FR.ISO-8859-1
> > > 
> > > I think using non-ASCII characters in /etc/locales.alias is dodgy; it
> > > would break in non- ISO-8859-1 environments. 
> > 
> > Break how? They will be display weirdly in other single byte encodings
> > and not be usable in multi-byte encodings. But they shouldn't _break_
> > anything.
> > 
> See Wishlist Bug #86761
> The point is to offer only aliases for locales that are present
> (via locale -a) and aliases for all locales present (see Bug #8615).
> 
> locales.alias (and locale -a) could then be used wherever a list of
> locale options are presented; eg. in gdm, rather than give a list of
> languages, for which support may or may not be present,
> locale-gen and localepurge and 'locale -a' could conspire to present the
> user a list of languages for which there is support, only. 
> However, if that language list comes from locales.alias, then it 
> (or its display) will be broken.
> 
> At the least, 'locale -a' gives the user a list of locales they can
> use, some of which can't be sensibly displayed or might mojibake the
> display in the wrong multibyte locale.

It seems glibc bug or upstream author's specification.
IMHO, printing all aliases via `locale -a' is BUG.
It needs upstream confirmation (If no one consult, I shall do.).

Including the entry like
	français           fr_FR.ISO8859-1
is followed by XFree86 locale alias database file
(/usr/lib/X11/locale/locale.alias).

But this file is tooooo obsolete and loosing reality. For example, 
X11's locale alias file contains (following HP-UX ?)
	japanese           ja_JP.SJIS
but Solaris 8 (/usr/openwin/lib/locale/locale.alias):
	japanese           ja_JP.EUC
Linux (/etc/locale.alias):
	japanese           ja_JP.eucJP
We japanese users want this field as ja_JP.eucJP.

I think X11's locale alias file should modify up to the current
environment, if it has been used (Is this file needed yet?).

-- gotom



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