[Alpine-info] Interaction between $LANG and Display Charset (nl_langinfo(CODESET))

[Wolfgang.Friebel at desy.de]

On Tue, 1 Apr 2008, Steve Hubert wrote:


> Still, it seems like a more reasonable way to attack the problem would be to 

> fix the other programs that require the LANG=C environment. Can you explain 

> what it is that causes you to set LANG=C when you'd really rather set 

> something richer? We wouldn't want to add such a strange configuration 

> possibility unless it was easy to explain why it was there and it would be 

> useful to more than a few people. Thanks.

>

There are many reasons why users do not want to change the locale away 
from C: Logging in into different computers with and without UTF8 support 
is one of the reasons (we do have centralized home dirs and users tend to 
keep their env across computers). Applications that are tested and running 
with LANG=C and yet untested with other locales is another one. Users 
working under zsh (z Shell) do also not have full UTF8 support yet. Some 
man pages refuse to get displayed properly either with or without UTF-8 
and so on.

In fact we cannot dictate what locale users will select. Just as an 
anectode unrelated to the problem there are programs that insist on 
chosing the paper size for printing based on the locale. While I like 
to see untranslated system error messages (LANG=C or LANG=en_US(.UTF-8)) I 
still would like to print on A4 paper. Well I could set LC_PAPER...

Personally I am using an UTF-8 locale and I am happy with it.

But to get back to the problem: I agree that the code concerning 
nl_langinfo is the correct implementation. Yet from a users perspective it 
is more practical to have more relaxed display charset settings.

I do not have a problem is the code remains unchanged. I'll just apply my 
tiny patch. I only thought that other users could have come across the 
same problem and would need a fix as well. As I wrote I do not see any 
drawbacks when using a slightly more comfortable display charset.

-- 
Wolfgang Friebel