Re: How to use the LANGUAGE environment variable

[Mirko Parthey <mirko.parthey@informatik.tu-chemnitz.de>]

On Sat, May 28, 2005 at 05:23:40PM -0400, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> > With LANGUAGE=en_GB:de_DE, I would have expected English output
> > rather than German.
>
> The problem is that most packages don't have "English" translations:
> 
> drow@nevyn:/big/fsf/local/glibc/intl% ls /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES | wc
>     190     190    2405
> drow@nevyn:/big/fsf/local/glibc/intl% ls /usr/share/locale/en/LC_MESSAGES | wc
>       3       3      29

I agree. On my system, there are actually quite a few "English"
translations under en_GB, but none for GNU coreutils, so I'm quite sure
this was the reason for the observed behaviour.

Now that I knew where to look, I repeated the experiment with xmms,
which does provide "English" messages:

mpa@guitar:~$ LANG=en_GB LANGUAGE=en_GB:en:de_DE:de xmms --badoption
xmms: unrecognised option `--badoption'

mpa@guitar:~$ LANG=en_GB LANGUAGE=de_DE:de:en_GB:en xmms --badoption
xmms: Unbekannte Option »--badoption«

The result is now what I expected.

> Did that help?

Yes, I think I understand now what's going on here.
The remaining issues seem to be only documentation-related, I reported
them as bug #311259 against glibc-doc.

Thank you for your explanations!
Mirko