Locale (Policy consult/proposal)
Hi,
I have a problem with locale and don't know if there is any policy around it.
Otherwise, we should certainly discuss this. Currently(AFAICS), locale catalogs
are installed into /usr/share/locale/%L/LC_MESSAGES/%N where %L is the language
as in $LANG or $LC_ALL and %N being the file. Alternatively, locale is also
searched under /usr/share/locale/%L/%N, but this seems not to be used at allo
for Debian. Note that this paths are hardwired in the libc (Makefile in the
catgets directory of the source tree). Now there are certain problems with this.
For example, for german, all programs seem to use
/usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/name but unfortunately, unless you define
LC_ALL=de rather than say LC_ALL=de_DE, this path is not searched automatically.
Now this can very well be a bug in the libc implementation but unless it is
corrected, it means that the file has to be installed in one directory and
then linked to all other variants of the language.
Now, there is a way to specify the only the language part of the LANG variable
using "%l" rather than "%L". I suggest that if there is no policy, we should
establish that the search path within the libc should be set to
/usr/share/locale/%L/LC_MESSAGES/%N:/usr/share/locale/%l/LC_MESSAGES/%N:/usr/share/locale/%L/%N
where the last bit is only set for compatibility reasons. This would force the
system to look for catalogs, first as de_DE (or en_UK) and then as de (or en).
That way, we can put general catalogs in the language directory and leave room
to add territorial variations in the corresponding directory.
If I hear no comment on this, I will file a bug on libc6 with priority important
as this breaks the way several programs should work.
Luis.
--
Luis Francisco Gonzalez <luisgh@cogs.susx.ac.uk>
PGP Fingerprint = F8 B1 13 DE 22 22 94 A1 14 BE 95 8E 49 39 78 76
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