L10N & LC variables

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

The first think we need for l10n, is have emacs be aware of the linguistic 
environment in which it is running (or eventually the language environment that 
it uses internally, which is much easier). I am not using gnu/linux so I am not 
sure how to do that there (although it does look relatively straightforward).

On Mac, the locale variables don't seem to be defined the way they are on 
gnu/linux. Here I only have "LC_CTYPE=UTF-8" and no other LC variable. I've 
checked that yesterday and it looks like there is a system "AppleLocale" 
variable that supersedes the LC variables and that returns the language 
selected in the global system preferences. There is also an "AppleLanguages" 
that returns *all* the languages added by the user in that same global system 
preference.

Here is what I get for my system:

> env | grep LC_
  LC_CTYPE=UTF-8

> defaults read -g AppleLocale
  en_JP

> defaults read -g AppleLanguages
  (
    "en-JP",
    "fr-JP",
    "ja-JP"
  )


I've checked whether that variable was used in Emacs and I found reference to 
it in Changelog.12.

> 2005-04-14  YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu  <address@hidden>
> 
>       * international/mule-cmds.el (set-locale-environment): On Mac OS,
>       use preferences AppleLocale and AppleLanguages, and variable
>       mac-system-locale for default locale.  On Mac OS Classic, use
>       mac-system-coding-system for default coding systems.

But there is no further references to mac-system-locale in the other changelogs 
and it looks like mule-cmds.el does not define it and there does not seem to be 
any place in the Emacs code that refers to AppleLocale or AppleLanguages 
anymore.

So, is that something that's been removed?

Jean-Christophe