[systemd-devel] [RFC PATCH 2/2] localed: add LANGUAGE= fallback when LANG= is specified

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Mon, Feb 02, 2015 at 11:56:39AM +0100, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek [2015-01-31 20:20 +0100]:
> > I think the implementation is fine, since it is rather trivial, but I'm
> > less certain about the implications of setting LANGUAGE in addtion to
> > LANG.
> 
> That's totally fine -- it's precisely what $LANGUAGE is meant for. One
> must be aware that it is a GNU extension, i. e. software like
> thunderbird won't respect it and thus just use $LANG (in which case
> you are no worse than now). But pretty much all "native" Linux sofware
> does and thus will behave as intended.  We've used this schema in
> Ubuntu since around 2005 [1].
Thanks. Incomplete support sounds fine.

> Now, I wish such a fallback list would be in upstream glibc so that
> OSes, systemd etc. wouldn't have to repeat and maintain it; but while
> [1] looks quite complex, it hasn't really changed in years.
Looking at the list, I'm wondering about using en_GB as the fallback for
most locales. I guess that for European countries it makes some sense, but
for Japanese, Kazakh, and many other places, I'd expect en_US to be
better last choice. Especially that en_US translation coverage is more
complete than en_GB.

Also, I'd expect a fallback to Russian before English for Kazakh, it's
their second official language.

> If this patch goes in, I'm happy to augment the list according to [1]
> and then move our language-selector to use that instead, to reduce
> duplication.
Great.

Zbyszek