Re: use of locale in "ls" again (Re: Japanese expression of date)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Tomohiro KUBOTA <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2001 21:35:03 +0900
> 
> > Ideally 'ls' would present output in a pleasant format to everybody.
> > But this has maintenance costs, and documentation costs, and setup
> > confusion costs, and these are all undesirable.  It is not entirely
> > implausible to argue that a standard date format lowers the overall
> > cost of using and maintaining the software -- so in that sense, it is
> > "better" than using idiosyncratic formats.
> 
> Anyway 'ls' already has .po files.  The cost of small enough because
> it means just adding one msgid.

I don't think the .po files are relevant: isn't it true that the names of
the months and the format of the date/time strings comes from the standard
C library, not from gettext?  If that's true, the translators cannot fix
that.

> > But GNU Emacs doesn't invoke 'ls' with LC_ALL=C.  It uses whatever
> > date format 'ls' uses, and displays that format to the user.
> 
> GNU Emacs must invoke 'ls' with LC_ALL=C if needed.

Emacs cannot do that because Emacs users want to see the directory
listing in their native localized format, just as they would if they
run "ls -la".