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Bug#345639: nl_langinfo(YESEXPR) ignores LANGUAGE, no apparent workaround



[Denis Barbier]
> On Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 06:27:35PM +0100, Claudio Nieder wrote:
> > Otherwise, if for libc supported language xx_YY no message catalog
> > is supplied, the user would receive the prompt in untranslated
> > english (y/N), but expected to type either ä or è because thats
> > what nl_langinfo expects for language xx_YY.
> 
> You are also right, but for this exact reason, y/n answers are also
> taken into account when they are unambiguous.  For instance in
> German, you can type y or j for yes, and n for no.

This doesn't fix it.  Consider a user who speaks Italian natively but
also speaks French.  She sets LANGUAGE=it_IT:it:fr and LANG=it_IT@euro.
I hope we can agree that this is a sensible thing to do.

Now she runs an app which is translated into French, but not into
Italian.  It prompts her in French:

  Faire ces changes?  [o/N]

and it calls nl_langinfo(YESEXPR) to parse the response.  This yields
"^[sSyY]" since it doesn't know anything about LANGUAGE or what message
catalogs are available.  (NOEXPR is not a problem, since all three
languages use "n".)

The only solution to this dilemma, at present, is to tell users *not*
to put multiple languages in their LANGUAGE variable.  But as far as I
can tell, that is the *only* point to the LANGUAGE variable in the
first place!

Which leaves us with the recommendation *not* to use LANGUAGE *at all*.
Would you agree?

Peter

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