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List:       xfree-i18n
Subject:    [I18n]Re: Missing locale settings in XFree locale files
From:       "Dmitry Yu. Bolkhovityanov" <D.Yu.Bolkhovityanov () inp ! nsk ! su>
Date:       2001-04-23 5:26:27
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On Sun, 22 Apr 2001 09:40:29 +0100, Markus Kuhn wrote:



> Morten Brix Pedersen wrote on 2001-04-21 20:32 UTC:
> > I can't see why this is a bad idea.. lots of people probably wants their
> > whole OS and workspace in English, but still be able to see their
> > national locale characters/whatever.
>
> There are no national character encodings any more (at least not outside
> Asia)! Both GB and DK use today any of ISO 8859-1, ISO 8859-15, UTF-8,
> CP1252, etc. happily.
>
> Did you really notice any practical difference between en_DK and en_GB
> for your purposes??? The character set is the same, the language is the
> same, etc. etc.
>
> I see absolutely no practical need for en_DK. As people said, it is a
> joke invented by Keld. Please describe the functional deficits that you
> experienced, not the lack of a locale that has the name that you think
> it should have. Names are nothing!
>
> In any case, in order to keep confused people who think that the country
> names have any significance happy, I'd strongly recommend to rename
> "en_GB" into "en" and if the curreny formatting is really required use
> something like
>
>   export LANG=en LC_MONETARY=EU
>
> or
>
>   export LANG=en LC_MONETARY=GB

    In fact, the "total"/"complete" solution is to set LANG, LC_CTYPE and
LC_COLLATE; for example (for Russia)

    LANG=en  # or "POSIX"/"C"
    LC_CTYPE=ru_RU.KOI8-R
    LC_COLLATE=$LC_CTYPE

    Without LC_'s you have wrong behaviour of text processing software and
wrong sort order.

    I used this for years, since when the locale was ru_SU, and it is what
local programmers/sysadmins prefer.

    And yes, using non-standard LC_NUMERIC is a disaster.  For example,
LC_NUMERIC=ru* uses "," instead of "." as decimal separator, which stops
e.g. scanf() from correctly interpreting floating-point numbers, etc.  What
a mess...

> P.S.. I always add
>
>  export LC_COLLATE=C
>
> because I like the ASCII/UCS sorting order with ls.

    Happy, happy europeans...  It is absolutely impossible with non-latin
alphabets and encodings, like koi8-*, when non-collated output from ls is
almost useless (well, unless you are a fan of koi7 ;-).

       ___________________________________________________________________
       Dmitry Yu. Bolkhovityanov  |  Novosibirsk, RUSSIA
       phone (383-2)-39-49-56     |  The Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics
                                  |  Lab. 5-13
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