Re: Default installation of UTF-8 locales

[Ulrich Drepper <drepper at redhat dot com>]

Paul Eggert <eggert@twinsun.com> writes:

> While we're on the subject, Solaris 8 supports the following UTF-8
> locales, [...]

See.  Yet another one with a personal wish list.


It is wrong to install all the files.  In actually pretty unhappy
about the long list we currently have and would like to see it removed.

How these things are supposed to work is that the tool to create user
accounts gets information about the language environment the user
wants.  Then it can go and run localedef.  Having other programs run
localedef is the only reason why localedef is documented in POSIX.
POSIX documents the interfaces of programs which are called by other
programs or scripts.

You could even have a tool which analyzes the user's environment
variables and generates the locales named by LC_* and LANG.  Make this
part of every installation and ask users to put this in their .profile
files etc.


Adding all possible locales at all times is possible, yes.  But it's
stupid since on any machine 90% of all the data is not used (with
UTF-8 locales installed the number would rise even higher).  It's a
senseless brute-force method which is not allowed to govern decisions
in any other part of the system.

If you want people not to have problems with non-existing locale files
think about ways that this can be made a non-issue by having them
created on demand.

-- 
---------------.                          ,-.   1325 Chesapeake Terrace
Ulrich Drepper  \    ,-------------------'   \  Sunnyvale, CA 94089 USA
Red Hat          `--' drepper at redhat.com   `------------------------