Hi, I have a problem with locale and don't know if there is any policy around it. Otherwise, we should certainly discuss this. Currently(AFAICS), locale catalogs are installed into /usr/share/locale/%L/LC_MESSAGES/%N where %L is the language as in $LANG or $LC_ALL and %N being the file. Alternatively, locale is also searched under /usr/share/locale/%L/%N, but this seems not to be used at allo for Debian. Note that this paths are hardwired in the libc (Makefile in the catgets directory of the source tree). Now there are certain problems with this. For example, for german, all programs seem to use /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/name but unfortunately, unless you define LC_ALL=de rather than say LC_ALL=de_DE, this path is not searched automatically. Now this can very well be a bug in the libc implementation but unless it is corrected, it means that the file has to be installed in one directory and then linked to all other variants of the language.
Now, there is a way to specify the only the language part of the LANG variable using "%l" rather than "%L". I suggest that if there is no policy, we should establish that the search path within the libc should be set to /usr/share/locale/%L/LC_MESSAGES/%N:/usr/share/locale/%l/LC_MESSAGES/%N:/usr/share/locale/%L/%N where the last bit is only set for compatibility reasons. This would force the system to look for catalogs, first as de_DE (or en_UK) and then as de (or en). That way, we can put general catalogs in the language directory and leave room to add territorial variations in the corresponding directory. If I hear no comment on this, I will file a bug on libc6 with priority important as this breaks the way several programs should work. Luis. -- Luis Francisco Gonzalez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PGP Fingerprint = F8 B1 13 DE 22 22 94 A1 14 BE 95 8E 49 39 78 76 -- E-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST. Trouble? E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
