Pádraig Brady wrote: > As a related issue, why do we indicate in the man page and FAQ to explicitly > set the order use LC_ALL rather than LC_COLLATE ?
Because there is a priority of variables available the documentation would need to say set LANG, unless LC_COLLATE is set in which case set LC_COLLATE, unless LC_ALL is set in which case set LC_ALL. That is much longer in the usage and much more confusing to users than simply saying set LC_ALL. If they actually set LC_ALL then we are confident that they will get the setting. It is a compromise. Also, I have heard of there being combinations of settings of character type and collating sequence that do not work together. Setting LC_ALL sets both but setting LC_COLLATE only sets one. If a user has an incompatible LC_CTYPE then setting LC_ALL=C is is okay but setting just LC_COLLATE=C is not safe. Unfortunately I am not knowledgeable about this problem enough to know if this is real or simply FUD. If anyone knows how this really works and would care to educate me I would appreciate it. But again setting LC_ALL avoids giving advice which might actually cause problems. > So one can't print warning messages, hmm. I think printing a warning message there would create a lot of problems for people in situations where they don't really care. Think of all of the cron jobs across all of the machines that would suddenly start generating output and sending mail. It would mostly make using sort outside of the C local impossible. Remember that US-ASCII is a proper subset of UTF-8. Sorting a data file in a script seems reasonable. But if on a data dependent basis it sometimes output warnings and at others it did not because the input data was different that would be a problem. In order to use UTF-8 sorting one would need to screen the input and see if it actually contained any of those characters and change the locale for sort on the fly in order to avoid the warning for those files that didn't include them. Bob _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
