* Tomohiro KUBOTA said: > > > it. Only a user who is sure that the console can display Polish > > > character set (ISO-8859-2, I guess) should set LANG variable. > > > > Why? An user can set LANG=C in his own profile. > > Of course a user who wants to set LANG=C or LANG=pl can do. > You are to set LANG=pl in /etc/environment for Polish users' > convenient, aren't you? However, if LANG is set to 'pl' and, > at the same time, if the console cannot display Polish characters, > a user will be annoyed. Messages the user would see would be > meaningless ISO-8859-1 (is that right?) substitutes of ISO-8859-2. I agree with you 100%. Most users log in from some terminal emulation software on windows and the Polish version of windows uses a 1252 CP, not ISO-8859-2 - that creates a beautiful mess on the screen. That's why I left LANG=C and if someone asks me whether there are Polish localized versions of the software I just show him how to set things up. They are all amazed at how easily it is done :)). There are some utilities that translate the output to CP1252, but they are rather cumbersome (they require a program in question to be launched as their child, eg. 'outputtrans mutt'). > You don't really have any experience of such row of meaningless > characters, do you? I am often annoyed by meaningless messages > written in 'Japanese' with ISO-8859-1 (or other) fonts. > > Ok, I don't say more if Polish people are happy with the > setting because I don't know how Polish people set-up > Polish environment. I have everything set up for English and so have most of my users, especially that on our server there are people speaking different languages. English is expected to be the default language on a networked, Unix server, so I see no problem and think that forcing the language to Polish or whatever other language is simply impolite. Other situation arises when the country laws require the software to be in the local language, but fortunately it's not the case in Poland, at least when we talk about the server products. > > I don't understand why the Debian must be English-only distribution > > by default. > > ASCII characters are the only characters which can displayed > safely in every consoles. Of course I want i18n of Linux. > I strongly feel I need i18n everytime I find a software cannot > handle my language (Japanese). I always think it is a stupid > situation that a Japanese newbie has to be an expert on set-up > of Japanese environment before starting using Linux. This is > why I wrote 'user-ja' package to semi-automatically establish > basic Japanese user environment. > However, unfortunately it is unsafe to assume that desired > characters are correctly displayed everywhere. Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Russian are all a tough case. They all use different alphabets or syllabaries (sp?) like Katakana, Hiragana (sp?), KOEI-8 and whatnot. They are all wide character sets. Fortunately the case with Polish discritics isn't that hard, but also complicated because there are many coding systems for Polish diacritics. The only universal solution to all that I can see is to have a self-destroying script that would ask the user when s/he logins first what language to set up for him and then modify the appriopriate shell startup file. Sure, it's a dirty solution, but I can't think of any other at that moment :(( > > Please note, this setting will be done if the administrator choise > > this language in debconf dialog. > > I have one question: can the raw Linux console display Polish > characters (ISO-8859-2?) correctly? Yes, if you use a correct font. There's an iso02g font in the consoletools distribution that sets everything up correctly. Another case is that the current X-Windows destroys the setup so that the kernel translation tables are broken and the font cannot be reset... (that's with my S3 Virge) > And note: /etc/environment affects not only an administrator's > environment but also all users' environments. Very true, but that's why it was invented :) marek
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