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