Page size pain / localisation / possible F13 feature

[Caolán McNamara]

On Thu, 2009-08-27 at 23:06 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Maybe we just need an en_INTL locale which defaults to US English 
> translations, but ISO standards everywhere else (ISO yyyy-mm-dd dates, ISO 
> A4 paper, metric units etc.)? (Currency would be a problem though, default 
> to €? $? The generic currency sign ¤ almost nobody actually uses? Or 
> something silly like "%f bucks"? ;-) ) Such a locale might even become the 
> default (though it'd irritate US folks ;-) ). I think it'd cover the needs 
> of most of the non-US users of en_US, and details could still be overidden 
> where needed.

Well, FWIW there is the (rather weird) en_DK locale, which has
YYYY-MM-YY dates (I think its the only locale where this is the default)
English
A4 Paper
Metric units
1.000,00 decimal format
0xA4 "Currency Sign" Currency

and then there is en_IE which has

DD/MM/YYYY dates
English
A4 Paper
Metric units
1,000.00 decimal format
€ Currency

Though I sort of reckon that the right-thing-to-do might be to instead
have a utility which convinces the user to configure their locale
setting *truthfully* but also support setting LANGUAGE, so that one can
specify that you want messages and the UI in English anyway, without
pulling in the extra baggage that comes with an en_US locale. e.g.
taking a standard German_Germany example

$ export LANG=de_DE.utf8
$ locale
LANG=de_DE.utf8
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.utf8"
LC_TIME="de_DE.utf8"
LC_COLLATE="de_DE.utf8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.utf8"
LC_PAPER="de_DE.utf8"
LC_NAME="de_DE.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.utf8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.utf8"
LC_ALL=
$ echo "\""$LANGUAGE"\""
""
$ ls --help | head -n 1
Aufruf: ls [OPTION]... [DATEI]...
$ date +%x
28.08.2009

assuming that English is the desired language for output and we're sort
of geeky and want ISO dates, then we should have something friendly that
allows one to configures things to get...

export LANG=de_DE.utf8
export LANGUAGE=en_US.utf8
export LC_TIME=en_DK.utf8
would give the probable truly desired outcome of...

$ locale
LANG=de_DE.utf8
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.utf8"
LC_TIME=en_DK.utf8
LC_COLLATE="de_DE.utf8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.utf8"
LC_PAPER="de_DE.utf8"
LC_NAME="de_DE.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.utf8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.utf8"
LC_ALL=
$ echo "\""$LANGUAGE"\""
"en_US.utf8"
$ ls --help | head -n 1
Usage: ls [OPTION]... [FILE]...
$ date +%x
2009-08-28

and that allows LANG to be retained for use as e.g. the default "content
creation" language, i.e. default spell check using that setting, gettext
LANGUAGE variable as the UI/output language, and the correct locale
values for currency, paper, etc.

C.