Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Ben de Groot <yngwin@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] UTF-8 locale by default
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2012 08:35:06
Message-Id: CAB9SyzRjWf03ZjQ8yOFXstQM20+qzor_dXK-8RL-Q4u7qUHoVg@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] UTF-8 locale by default by Dan Douglas
1 On 27 July 2012 16:06, Dan Douglas <ormaaj@×××××.com> wrote:
2 > On Friday, July 27, 2012 09:08:36 AM Ulrich Mueller wrote:
3 >> >>>>> On Fri, 27 Jul 2012, Ben de Groot wrote:
4 >>
5 >> > I understand why the council rejected Debian's C.UTF-8 option,
6 >> > but is there really no better default that we can use?
7 >>
8 >> > Without any default locale set, in practically all cases that means
9 >> > that the user is presented with English, and mostly the American
10 >> > variant. So, in practice, we are defaulting to en_US, just not in a
11 >> > unicode environment. Correct me if I'm wrong.
12 >>
13 >> See below. We're not defaulting to en_US for things like the number
14 >> format.
15 >>
16 >> > Also, in most other places (such as our website, GLEPs, ebuilds)
17 >> > we default to en_US.UTF-8.
18 >>
19 >> > So let's upgrade to en_US.UTF-8, which is for most users more
20 >> > desirable than the current situation. Of course we will still advise
21 >> > them to set their desired locales in /etc/locale.gen. But at least
22 >> > they will start with a unicode environment, as expected anno 2012.
23 >>
24 >> As I had pointed out before [1], changing from POSIX to an en_US
25 >> locale will have undesirable side effects, like commas as thousands
26 >> separators in numbers (because of LC_NUMERIC). Also the defaults of
27 >> en_US for LC_MEASUREMENT and LC_PAPER are only useful in the U.S.
28 >>
29 >> So if we change the default (but I still don't see the need), we
30 >> should go for a less intrusive setting like:
31 >>
32 >> LANG="POSIX"
33 >> LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf8"
34 >>
35 >> Ulrich
36 >>
37 >
38 > You're concerned about the commas breaking things? Given that you usually need
39 > to specifically ask for them (i.e., printf ' flag), and that kind of output is
40 > usually going to be for human consumption only that seems unlikely. If
41 > anything does rely upon the format, can't tolerate different locales, and fails
42 > to specify LC_NUMERIC then it's broken anyway.
43 >
44 > LC_MONETARY / LC_MEASUREMENT as en_US are probably slightly more annoying
45 > defaults for some people. What do users of other distros think? Is this really
46 > a serious problem for anyone?
47 >
48 > LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 would be a bare minimum. The important bit is getting utf8
49 > by default. I can live with LANG=POSIX.
50 > --
51 > Dan Douglas
52
53 How about the below?
54
55 LANG=en_GB.utf8
56 LC_COLLATE=C
57 LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8
58
59 That will give us A4 paper size and the metric system. If LC_NUMERIC is
60 really a problem, we can set it to something more desirable.
61 --
62 Cheers,
63
64 Ben | yngwin
65 Gentoo developer
66 Gentoo Qt project lead, Gentoo Wiki admin

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-dev] UTF-8 locale by default "Michał Górny" <mgorny@g.o>