The environment variable $LANGUAGE
I have a question to the list: What documentation should I read to
understand the environment variable $LANGUAGE, and it's relationship
with the ordinary locale variables ($LANG, $LC_*, and $LC_ALL)?
There was a thread on debian-chinese-gb list [1], about a problem that
the user can't get a Chinese GNOME environment from startx no matter how
he sets the locale. It turns out the problem is the "export
LANGUAGE="en_US:en_GB:en" line in /etc/environment, changing it to
"zh_CN:en_US:en" solves the problem. This line is set by
debian-installer when install in US English. [2]
My previous impression has been that $LANGUAGE is just an auxiliary
variable, helping to choose the second desired language if the first is
not available. However Christian has pointed to me that's not the case,
and the application can user $LANGUAGE "however as they want". It seems
in GNOME, $LANGUAGE overrides $LANG and $LC_MESSAGES settings.
So I'd like to know more about the usage of $LANGUAGE, but I can't find
good documentations. Can anyone on the list provide some pointers (or
give some opinions)?
1. (in Chinese)
http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-chinese-gb@lists.debian.org/msg11068.html
2. People would say "then don't install in English, install in
Chinese"! But the problem is that d-i doesn't install a
framebuffer-enabled terminal (like jfbterm used in 1st stage) for
Chinese install. So the user will get garbled characters in the 2nd
stage of installation (the part running base-config), so most Chinese
users choose to install in English instead.
Thanks in advance,
Ming
2005.11.03
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