Re: [gentoo-dev] UTF-8 locale by default

[Michał Górny]

On Fri, 27 Jul 2012 16:34:01 +0800
Ben de Groot <yngwin@g.o> wrote:

> On 27 July 2012 16:06, Dan Douglas <ormaaj@×××××.com> wrote:
> > On Friday, July 27, 2012 09:08:36 AM Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> >> >>>>> On Fri, 27 Jul 2012, Ben de Groot wrote:
> >>
> >> > I understand why the council rejected Debian's C.UTF-8 option,
> >> > but is there really no better default that we can use?
> >>
> >> > Without any default locale set, in practically all cases that
> >> > means that the user is presented with English, and mostly the
> >> > American variant. So, in practice, we are defaulting to en_US,
> >> > just not in a unicode environment. Correct me if I'm wrong.
> >>
> >> See below. We're not defaulting to en_US for things like the number
> >> format.
> >>
> >> > Also, in most other places (such as our website, GLEPs, ebuilds)
> >> > we default to en_US.UTF-8.
> >>
> >> > So let's upgrade to en_US.UTF-8, which is for most users more
> >> > desirable than the current situation. Of course we will still
> >> > advise them to set their desired locales in /etc/locale.gen. But
> >> > at least they will start with a unicode environment, as expected
> >> > anno 2012.
> >>
> >> As I had pointed out before [1], changing from POSIX to an en_US
> >> locale will have undesirable side effects, like commas as thousands
> >> separators in numbers (because of LC_NUMERIC). Also the defaults of
> >> en_US for LC_MEASUREMENT and LC_PAPER are only useful in the U.S.
> >>
> >> So if we change the default (but I still don't see the need), we
> >> should go for a less intrusive setting like:
> >>
> >>    LANG="POSIX"
> >>    LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf8"
> >>
> >> Ulrich
> >>
> >
> > You're concerned about the commas breaking things? Given that you
> > usually need to specifically ask for them (i.e., printf ' flag),
> > and that kind of output is usually going to be for human
> > consumption only that seems unlikely. If anything does rely upon
> > the format, can't tolerate different locales, and fails to specify
> > LC_NUMERIC then it's broken anyway.
> >
> > LC_MONETARY / LC_MEASUREMENT as en_US are probably slightly more
> > annoying defaults for some people. What do users of other distros
> > think? Is this really a serious problem for anyone?
> >
> > LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 would be a bare minimum. The important bit is
> > getting utf8 by default. I can live with LANG=POSIX.
> > --
> > Dan Douglas
>
> How about the below?
>
> LANG=en_GB.utf8
> LC_COLLATE=C
> LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8
>
> That will give us A4 paper size and the metric system. If LC_NUMERIC
> is really a problem, we can set it to something more desirable.

LC_NUMERIC=pl_PL.utf8

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny