locales (was: minutes of ESC call ...)

[Miklos Vajna]

Hi Eike,

On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 05:25:51PM +0200, Eike Rathke <erack at redhat.com> wrote:
> > But that is just plain wrong IMHO, LC_MESSAGES=C can be used to get
> > "everything in English" without screwing up LANG.
> 
> How many users know about a C locale? And how many know that there's
> LC_MESSAGES that can be set differently and how? An why should anyone
> choose C that doesn't even know utf-8?  Nowadays you mostly choose
> a locale during installation and never touch it again. If you want an
> English system that usually results in LC_ALL and LANG set to
> en_US.UTF-8 then.

I admit probably only a few users read man locale.conf (and probably I'm
just too young if there was already such a manpage when I first met this
problem ;-) ), on the other hand I still think this sounds like the
proper way of solving the situation.

By the way, as far as I understand man 7 locale, the LC_COLLATE
determines the encoding (and if that's unset LANG), so LC_MESSAGES=C + a
utf-8 LANG results in a configuration that "knows" utf-8.

> That's what I do as well despite living in de_DE, because my daily work
> happens in English environments (and I never understood why and how
> anyone can bear translated system and compiler messages ;-)  and even

Sure, I agree. :-)

> most data import involves en_US separators and so on. When I feel a need
> of nitpicking I can set paper and measurement and monetary and such to
> de_DE, but then again LibO handles only LC_PAPER of those.

One of my motivations is that the KDE calendar this way still mentions
our Hungarian public holidays (maybe GNOME does the same, no idea).

> And yes,
> a finer granularity of the LibO internal locales that takes also system
> settings into account is on my todo list.

Nah, I didn't mean to criticise that, I just wanted to share that I
think when one sets LANG to en_US and files a bugreport about a wrong
default paper size, my answer would be "you asked for it".

Miklos