Bug#632798: libc6: broken LANGUAGE design

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi again,

One more quick comment.

Vincent Lefevre wrote:

> My settings come from the installation. /etc/default/locale was:
>
> #  File generated by update-locale
> #LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
> LANGUAGE="en_US:en"
>
> (I only added a LC_TIME=en_DK since, hoping it would be taken into
> account for the time displayed by gdm).
>
> FYI, I installed the machine on 2010-01-04.

Now I'm confused again.  That particular LANGUAGE setting is (I hope)
redundant next to LANG, so it should not have been set, right?  That
is supposed to have been fixed in localechooser 1.07 (2006-03-26):

   * Only use LANGUAGELIST list of languages when really needed, ie
     when a language needs and benefits from something else than English.
     Should avoid reports like #356997.

The only choices I see that should be setting LANGUAGE based on the
current localechooser data file are Northern Sami, Norwegian Bokmaal,
Norwegian Nynorsk, Portuguese, Malagasy, and Wolof.  (Plus Chinese
(Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), and Portuguese (Brazil), but I
suspect those are bugs.)
 
Am I misunderstanding how LANGUAGE is supposed to be used?  Did
localechooser regress?