Bug#311259: error and omission in documentation of LANGUAGE
On Mon, May 30, 2005 at 08:35:51AM -0400, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> On Mon, May 30, 2005 at 10:59:29AM +0200, Mirko Parthey wrote:
> > Package: glibc-doc
> > Version: 2.3.2.ds1-22
> >
> > LANGUAGE seems to have no effect unless LANG is set to something other
> > than C. I would propose to document this behaviour in the libc reference
> > manual, where LANGUAGE is explained.
>
> This bit I can obviously reproduce...
>
> > Related to this, the documentation claims that LANGUAGE is evaluated
> > first, i.e. before any other variables defining the locale. I found out
> > by experiment that LANGUAGE seems to be evaluated second-last, and takes
> > precedence just over LANG. If this is correct, I would propose to change
> > the documentation accordingly.
>
> But not this, do you have an example?
>
> drow@nevyn:~% LANG=en_US LANGUAGE=en_US:de_DE:en_US cat -h
> cat: Ungültige Option -- h
> ,,cat --help" gibt weitere Informationen.
> drow@nevyn:~% LANG=en_US LC_ALL=en_US LANGUAGE=en_US:de_DE:en_US cat -h
> cat: Ungültige Option -- h
> ,,cat --help" gibt weitere Informationen.
Sorry, please ignore the second part - I was actually just confused by
the first problem again.
I thought this was a valid example:
mpa@galba:~$ LANG=en_GB LANGUAGE=de_DE:de:en_GB:en LC_MESSAGES=de_DE xmms --badoption
xmms: Unbekannte Option »--badoption«
mpa@galba:~$ LANG=en_GB LANGUAGE=de_DE:de:en_GB:en LC_MESSAGES=C xmms --badoption
xmms: unrecognized option `--badoption'
But it is not - I must not set the locale to C, by whatever means,
otherwise LANGUAGE is ignored. Upon re-reading your first E-Mail, this
is exactly what you said. :-)
I had thought this behaviour was limited to LANG=C, but it isn't.
When using LC_MESSAGES=en_GB instead of C, the behaviour matches the
documentation, and LANGUAGE takes precedence:
mpa@galba:~$ LANG=en_GB LANGUAGE=de_DE:de:en_GB:en LC_MESSAGES=en_GB xmms --badoption
xmms: Unbekannte Option »--badoption«
So my bugreport reduces to the request for documentation about LANGUAGE
being ignored in a C locale.
Mirko
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