Re: non-ASCII characters in /etc/locales.alias ?
On Wed, Jan 23, 2002 at 09:53:04AM +0000, Alastair McKinstry wrote:
> The user should not be messing about with locale aliases. In this sense,
> I agree with Ulrich; it should just "go away". It is there for
Should, but probably won't, so it can't be simply ignored.
> Ulrich is also right that they are "byte sequences", and as their
Not really relevant. All files are byte sequences, so this is true by
default. Textfiles are *constrained* byte sequences, and this breaks
the constraints normally imposed on system textfiles.
> However the file is confusing, and misleads the user into thinking
> "fran?ais" (if that is how it is shown in the "wrong" locale), is a
> valid locale name, or "bokml"; they may type in those as locale names,
> and things break. Also, if they do "locale -a" they will be shown these
> "locales", which are invalid, and hence not really available.
And "locale -a" should never be outputting anything that's not in the
user's charset, nor should any system tool that should know better.
> This is why I brought the subject up in the context of locale-gen: I
> believe the whole locales.alias file should be autogenerated by
> locale-gen. Because not only is "fran?ais" an invalid locale, if I
> haven't got the locale files on my system generated by locale-gen, then
> "LANG=german" is also invalid, and should not be shown as a valid entry
> in /etc/locales.alias or "locale -a". These should show "all available
> locales", as described in the man page (on Linux, and similarly on
> Solaris, etc. looking around here..)
I agree. "locale -a" is documented as: "Write names of available
locales." It displays names of *unavailable* locale aliases, so either
it's a bug or it's misdocumented.
This could be fixed with a patch to locale rather than playing around
with the aliases file, however.
Is there any need for locale -a to display aliases at all? They're not
really locales, they're just aliases *to* locales.
> I Think this should generate these entries. It should also include the
> "français" and "bokmål" entries, as they may be needed (when French and
> Norwegian locales are generated), but probably issue warnings that they
> are for backward compatability and should not be used. The locale.alias
Er, then issue warnings whenever any French or Norwegian locales are
generated? That's no good. Perhaps --compat with a warning in the docs
and --help.
> Hence the "-*- coding: ISO-8859-1 -*-" tag I suggested for locale.alias.
> Yes, its emacs specific, but it gets the point across and at least makes
> one editor work right. Its a workaround to a misfeature; the
It implies the invalid sequences are valid, may encourage this in other
files, implies changing this line somehow changes how the file is
interpreted by programs (ie. that "locale -a" uses it). If anything
should be added, it's something to the effect of "warning: this file contains
ISO-8859-1 characters which should not be here; do not do this anywhere else."
--
Glenn Maynard
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