Re: Automating of localizations

[Tomohiro KUBOTA <debian@tmail.plala.or.jp>]

Hi,

Please check whether language-env package meets your need.

It prepares so-called "dot files" for a user who invoked
a command "set-language-env".  Though I am the maintainer
of the package, the concrete contents of dot files for each
language are left to contributors.

Since it was originally developed to support Japanese, it
is extremely flexible and extensible.  (Japanese is a
multibyte language and needs vast and complicated
configurations.)

If the "configuration" can be done completely by dot files,
I think you can use this package.

However, it cannot do system-wide configurations.
It is because I think system-wide locale configuration is
sometimes dangerous.  For example, there are no ways to
configure Linux console to automatically support Japanese.
Unconditionally setting LANG variable is dangerous in such
a case, because Mojibake (http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/mojibake/)
occurs.  Imagine if you are a root user and you cannot read
some important message because of Mojibake.... (In Greek,
please imagine reading a Greek document with Latin-1 font.)

Of course there are languages for which system-wide setting
is not so dangerous.  However, I am not interested in it
unless someone contributes a working code.

I imagine Greek people can understand the concept of Mojibake.

---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/