How to use the LANGUAGE environment variable
[I had first posted this on debian-user, but did not receive any
helpful replies.]
According to the glibc reference manual, LANGUAGE can contain a
colon-separated list of locales to indicate their order of preference.
However, the behaviour I observed is different from what I expected.
(see the table; tested with "cat -h", which produces a short error message)
LANGUAGE seems to have no effect when I leave LANG unset,
so I did the experiment with LANG=de_DE and LANG=en_GB.
+---------+---------+
LANGUAGE LANG> | de_DE | en_GB |
V | | |
+-----------------+---------+---------+
| en_GB | english | english |
| de_DE | german | german |
| en_GB:de_DE | german | german | <- this seems strange to me
| de_DE:en_GB | german | german |
+-----------------+---------+---------+
With LANGUAGE=en_GB:de_DE, I would have expected English output
rather than German.
Is this a misunderstanding on my part about how LANGUAGE works,
or should I report this as a bug in glibc/locales/gettext?
Mirko
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