Re: [gentoo-dev] UTF-8 locale by default

[Dan Douglas <ormaaj@gmail.com>]

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On Friday, July 27, 2012 09:08:36 AM Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> >>>>> On Fri, 27 Jul 2012, Ben de Groot wrote:
> 
> > I understand why the council rejected Debian's C.UTF-8 option,
> > but is there really no better default that we can use?
> 
> > Without any default locale set, in practically all cases that means
> > that the user is presented with English, and mostly the American
> > variant. So, in practice, we are defaulting to en_US, just not in a
> > unicode environment. Correct me if I'm wrong.
> 
> See below. We're not defaulting to en_US for things like the number
> format.
> 
> > Also, in most other places (such as our website, GLEPs, ebuilds)
> > we default to en_US.UTF-8.
> 
> > So let's upgrade to en_US.UTF-8, which is for most users more
> > desirable than the current situation. Of course we will still advise
> > them to set their desired locales in /etc/locale.gen. But at least
> > they will start with a unicode environment, as expected anno 2012.
> 
> As I had pointed out before [1], changing from POSIX to an en_US
> locale will have undesirable side effects, like commas as thousands
> separators in numbers (because of LC_NUMERIC). Also the defaults of
> en_US for LC_MEASUREMENT and LC_PAPER are only useful in the U.S.
> 
> So if we change the default (but I still don't see the need), we
> should go for a less intrusive setting like:
> 
>    LANG="POSIX"
>    LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf8"
> 
> Ulrich
> 

You're concerned about the commas breaking things? Given that you usually need 
to specifically ask for them (i.e., printf ' flag), and that kind of output is 
usually going to be for human consumption only that seems unlikely. If 
anything does rely upon the format, can't tolerate different locales, and fails 
to specify LC_NUMERIC then it's broken anyway.

LC_MONETARY / LC_MEASUREMENT as en_US are probably slightly more annoying 
defaults for some people. What do users of other distros think? Is this really 
a serious problem for anyone?

LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 would be a bare minimum. The important bit is getting utf8 
by default. I can live with LANG=POSIX.
-- 
Dan Douglas

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