Re: [gentoo-user] locale issue to clean up

[Mike Edenfield]

Mark Knecht wrote:

>>> lightning ~ # cat /etc/locale.gen
>>> en_US ISO-8859-1
>>> en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8

Just to be safe, try running locale-gen again.  The glibc 
ebuild does this automatically, but if you've changed 
locale.gen since the last time that ebuild ran, you need to 
run locale-gen to pick up the changes.

>>> lightning ~ # cat /etc/env.d/02locale
>>> LANG=en_US

I think that adding LC_ALL="en_US" in this file should be 
all you need.  Basically, your "locale" is made up of about 
a dozen different settings that describe how to display 
things like dates, money, big numbers, sorted lists, etc. 
Each of these options has an LC_* variable associated with 
it.  Additionally, there is a LANG variable that specifies 
which language translation to use (LANGUAGES is a 
GNU-specific alternative to LC_MESSAGES, IIRC, and I rarely 
specify it).

LC_ALL is used if you know you want the use one locale for 
everything, and specifying LC_ALL="en_US" will automatically 
set all of the others for you.  Setting that end rerunning 
env-update ; source /etc/profile should get rid of those 
locale errors.


> Looking above I don't have LANG or LC_ALL entries and the LINGUAS is
> suspect. If I was to convert them to your settings do I then need to
> rebuild any apps that use them?

You don't need LANG/LC_ALL in your make.conf if they are set 
properly in your environment, e.g. in env.d/02locale, since 
they are both run-time environment settings that you want to 
be the same everywhere.

LINGUAS is a build-time setting that tells any 
localization-aware autoconf scripts to install the language 
translation files for the set of languages you listed. 
Having LINGUAS="en en_US" in make.conf is correct, it makes 
sure that only English-language translations are installed. 
  (Not all applications are LINGUAS-aware, so you will still 
see a lot of other languages you didn't ask for.).