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

[Mike Edenfield <kutulu@kutulu.org>]

Mark Knecht wrote:

> You may be correct about setting all of this in 02locale. I noticed
> that the Gentoo formatting stuff for vi is treating LC_ALL and
> LC_COLLATE differently than LINGUAS. The manual seems to say set
> system wide stuff in 02locale and user stuff in your own account.

They are different.

LINGUAS is a build-time hint for localized programs that lists which 
languages you want translations for.  It has no effect at run-time other 
than ensuring that your selected languages are available.

The LC_* variables, and LANG, are run-time settings that tell the C 
library which locale to use.  LC_COLLATE, for example, tells vi how to 
sort things alphabetically.

Just as an aside, I see frequent warnings not to set LC_ALL because it's 
"dangerous", but that seems like a vast overreaction to me.  LC_ALL is a 
global setting that overrides all of the other LC_ variables with a 
single setting.  The "danger" is that you cannot then individually 
override the behavior, say to use a different currency or sorting 
format, but IMO the people who need to do that are the exception, and 
would clearly know how to do it.

For a single user system with a single locale where all the LC_* 
variables have the same value anyway, setting LC_ALL to "en_US" and 
settings the other half-dozen LC_* variables to "en_US" has the same effect.