On Thu, 2025-10-16 at 12:46 +0000, Pollo wrote:
> On translationproject.org they show no email for en_GB, I ll try the
> team leader Nigel Titley directly.

That's a good plan, thanks!

> So should I cc you?

Sure, although I have no ability to resolve this issue.

> Where (in what repo) does this need to be eventually fixed? I might
> wanna try to fix it if this is easy.

It doesn't get changed in the GNU Make repository.  The translations
are all managed and stored by the Translation Project, and when a GNU
Make release is built the latest versions are downloaded from the TP
system and installed into the release.

In order to change this yourself you'd have to first build GNU Make
from the Git repo (which requires a lot of extra infrastructure like
autoconf, automake, gettext, etc.) then after it downloads the standard
transaltions you'd have to go in and modify them with an editor.

> I did not know that everything gets kindof "looked up" at runtime?
> How do I set my environment in such a way that I get text as the one
> written in the code (so that I do not depend on all these
> translations), but retaining a more European date-time format and so
> on? Is this something related only to programs written in C? Where
> can I learn a bit more about it?

Not dumb.  Internationalization is a complex topic and there's a lot to
learn about it.

Localization is controlled by various environment variables.  There are
variables, like LC_ALL, that control all aspects at once, then there
are specific variables that control different aspects of localization.

There is more info here:
https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Locale-Environment-Variables.html
Unfortunately it doesn't describe exactly what all the variables are or
do.

The "C" locale is special and means: don't do any translation at all
and use the built-in text.

For what you want to do, probably it will work for you to do this:

First, make sure that neither LANGUAGE nor any of the LC_* environment
variables are set, including LC_ALL.

Second, set LANG to "C" to choose the default locale for all unset
types.

Finally, set LC_TIME to en_GB to choose a more European time format. 
You can also set other LC variables like LC_MONETARY, LC_COLLATE,
LC_NUMERIC, etc. as you like.

Make sure the variables are exported of course!

Now, it _should_ behave as you want.

Another option that might work, is to set LANG=en_GB, and set
LC_MESSAGES=C so that everything is en_GB except actual messages.

Note: I haven't tried these.

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