Re: Possible bug in glibc re locales

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

[John Darrington, 2003-07-09]
> The LANGUAGE env var doesn't always seem to behave as documented.

Which documentation are you reading?

> However, if we take another example:
>
> bash-2.05a$ export LANGUAGE=de_DE
> bash-2.05a$ export LANG=en
> bash-2.05a$ cat laskdj
> cat: laskdj: No such file or directory
>
>
> Here, the answer is in English wheras it should have been German.
> Is this a bug??

No, it is not a bug.  The translation available is 'de', not 'de_DE'.
So if you want this to work, you will have to set "LANGUAGE=de_DE:de".
This way the translations will be selected in priority order de_DE if
available, 'de' if 'de_DE' is missing and 'de' is available, and
finally 'en' if both are missing.  The list of language codes in the
LANGUAGE variable maps to directories in /usr/share/locale/, and it is
not split on '_' to generate language codes.