Re: set-locale-environement: strange default detection

[David Kastrup]

Sascha Wilde <address@hidden> writes:

> a friend of mine (unfortunately a vim user, but a nice guy otherwise),
> tried emacs on Gnu/Linux and was surprised that `C-h t' presented him
> the German version of the tutorial.
>
> His i18n environment is:
> LANG=en_US
> address@hidden
> LC_NUMERIC="en_US"
> LC_TIME="en_US"
> LC_COLLATE=POSIX
> LC_MONETARY="en_US"
> LC_MESSAGES="en_US"
> LC_PAPER="en_US"
> LC_NAME="en_US"
> LC_ADDRESS="en_US"
> LC_TELEPHONE="en_US"
> LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US"
> LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US"
> LC_ALL=
>
> so it should be clear, that, also he wants to be able to handle German
> texts properly, he wants his user interfaces in English.
>
> But set-locale-environment tests LC_CTYPE _before_ LANG, from the
> doc string: 
>
>   If LOCALE-NAME is nil, its value is taken from the environment
>   variables LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG (the first one that is set).
>
> Which IMO is an bug.  (LC_CTYPE is not supposed to be used as an
> indicator for the ui language at all, but if it is used, it should be
> used as an last resort.)

The problem is that we don't have finegrained support.  For the
purpose of talking to the user, LC_MESSAGES is relevant.  But Emacs so
rarely has the opportunity to talk anything but English to the user
that we simply have no reasonable interface into this for now.

-- 
David Kastrup