On 27 July 2012 16:06, Dan Douglas <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Friday, July 27, 2012 09:08:36 AM Ulrich Mueller wrote:
>> >>>>> On Fri, 27 Jul 2012, Ben de Groot wrote:
>>
>> > I understand why the council rejected Debian's C.UTF-8 option,
>> > but is there really no better default that we can use?
>>
>> > Without any default locale set, in practically all cases that means
>> > that the user is presented with English, and mostly the American
>> > variant. So, in practice, we are defaulting to en_US, just not in a
>> > unicode environment. Correct me if I'm wrong.
>>
>> See below. We're not defaulting to en_US for things like the number
>> format.
>>
>> > Also, in most other places (such as our website, GLEPs, ebuilds)
>> > we default to en_US.UTF-8.
>>
>> > So let's upgrade to en_US.UTF-8, which is for most users more
>> > desirable than the current situation. Of course we will still advise
>> > them to set their desired locales in /etc/locale.gen. But at least
>> > they will start with a unicode environment, as expected anno 2012.
>>
>> As I had pointed out before [1], changing from POSIX to an en_US
>> locale will have undesirable side effects, like commas as thousands
>> separators in numbers (because of LC_NUMERIC). Also the defaults of
>> en_US for LC_MEASUREMENT and LC_PAPER are only useful in the U.S.
>>
>> So if we change the default (but I still don't see the need), we
>> should go for a less intrusive setting like:
>>
>>    LANG="POSIX"
>>    LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf8"
>>
>> Ulrich
>>
>
> You're concerned about the commas breaking things? Given that you usually need
> to specifically ask for them (i.e., printf ' flag), and that kind of output is
> usually going to be for human consumption only that seems unlikely. If
> anything does rely upon the format, can't tolerate different locales, and 
> fails
> to specify LC_NUMERIC then it's broken anyway.
>
> LC_MONETARY / LC_MEASUREMENT as en_US are probably slightly more annoying
> defaults for some people. What do users of other distros think? Is this really
> a serious problem for anyone?
>
> LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 would be a bare minimum. The important bit is getting utf8
> by default. I can live with LANG=POSIX.
> --
> Dan Douglas

How about the below?

LANG=en_GB.utf8
LC_COLLATE=C
LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8

That will give us A4 paper size and the metric system. If LC_NUMERIC is
really a problem, we can set it to something more desirable.
-- 
Cheers,

Ben | yngwin
Gentoo developer
Gentoo Qt project lead, Gentoo Wiki admin

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