Bug#632798: libc6: broken LANGUAGE design
Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2011-07-07 18:46:38 -0500, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
>> If ssh were to transmit it and let it
>> override /etc/default/locale, wouldn't sending LANGUAGE="" work?
>
> Only if LANGUAGE is set.
True. In particular, if the user doesn't know to defend against a
remote LANGUAGE setting, this won't help him.
Unconditionally prepending LC_MESSAGES to the LANGUAGE list is
starting to sound more appealing.
> But what about systems not based on glibc?
> They could have a LANGUAGE environment variable with a different
> meaning and setting LANGUAGE="" may have a bad effect.
The only library I've heard of that pays attention to LANGUAGE is
gettext's libintl, even on systems not based on glibc. I think the
empty-LANGUAGE trick should be safe and portable to all systems where
the ssh server allows it to override local defaults.
Next step is to write some patches (and after that to pass them to
upstreams and learn what they think), so I will probably go quiet for
a while. Still, I'm very grateful for your help in thinking the
design through.
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