Re: [gentoo-dev] et_EE locale and language of error messages

["Harald van Dijk" <truedfx@gentoo.org>]

On Fri, May 19, 2006 at 11:38:06AM +0200, Stefan Schweizer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> there are at least two problems with how portage currently handles locales:
> 
> - Firstly some packages fail to build with obscure LC_* settings
> The continuous stream of et_EE bugs is annoying: http://tinyurl.com/jsqzb
> 
> - and secondly I get my gcc output in german when I have a german locale
> set. This makes it really hard to report bugs or the bugreports are useless
> for most developers that do not understand the language.
> 
> Those problems cannot be easily workarounded since portage does not use
> LC_ALL and LANG settings from /etc/make.conf
> 
> I propose to have the portage build environment set the language to English
> or LC_ALL=C by default. That would significantly reduce the bugs with
> unreadable error messages+ solve all the et_EE bugs at once.
> 
> One problem could be that packages depend on LC_* to install the correct
> language. But that is a real bug then in my opinion, because ebuilds should
> only honour LINGUAS and not LC_* during build time. Those bugs should be
> detected and fixed.
> 
> What do you think? LC_ALL=C in portage or not?

No, it's needlessly unfriendly to users, and encourages broken packages.
et_EE breakage should be fixed, and slowly but surely is, and as for
unreadable error messages, getting German gcc output in a German locale
is a feature, not a bug. It can indeed be a problem in bugreports, but
it's a much milder one, since it's trivial to look up what any
particular message is translated from.
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