Re: lynx-dev Re: lynx should respect LANG

[Klaus Weide]

On Thu, 1 Jun 2000, Henry Nelson wrote:

> PS  An aside on the NLS discussion we had wrt:
> > policy.  But it isn't required - both LANG and LANGUAGE can take the
> > same kinds of strings (like "ja_JP", "ja_JP.eucJP" or "ja_JP.ujis")
> > which may or may not explicitly mention a character encoding.
> 
> My understanding of "acceptable" strings for LANG and LANGUAGE seems to
> be different from yours.  LANG, AFAIK on Solaris, _has_ to be a valid
> character set name which can be determined by issuing the command
> "locale -a."  

Yes, because it has to be recognized by various level, OS and/or system
libraries and/or other infrastructure (possibly including the terminal
emulator itself, or whatever sits between that and lynx).

> LANGUAGE, OTOH, is simply the name of the directory under a
> prescribed path definition that contains the message catalogue under the
> specific category in question.  Therefore, I have always considered it
> "legal" to set LANGUAGE to things like "ja-pub" or "ja-kan" for subsets
> within a particular language.  

Since it is a GNU gettext extension, it has to be only recognized by that.
Meaning, it has to match the location of an installed message catalogue.
Since you install message catalogues yourself, you can (re-) define what's
valid and what's not.

If you were installing new locales at the system level, and I believe
you can, you could also redefine what's valid and what's not.

If you were using just one variable, say LANG, to control both aspects
(i.e. 'system' and messages), then you'd have to set it to a value that is
recognized by both.  I believe it's the intention in gettext that LANGUAGE 
be used with the same kinds of strings[*], although it doesn't preclude
extensions.

[*] Except that LANGUAGE can have several of those, separated by ':'.

> Like now I'm evaluating the translation Kohda
> turned us on to (Remember I arrived in Japan before most of these people
> were born; we speak a different language.), so I have it stuck under
> "ja-hatta."  I once started a Kansai dialect translation that would have
> been pretty funny to those Kanto guys.

To make your system fully consistent, you'd also create a ja-hatta
system locale, with all aspects properly ja-hatta-fied...  (I have no
idea what that means, I just hope I haven't accidentaly created a term
that is an insult in Japanese.)  You might want to rename it to
"address@hidden", for consistency with some existing conventions, and
make "ja-hatta" an alias for that, etc...  I don't know whether that's
all possible for Solaris without system source code, but it should be.

  Klaus


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