Re: locales and .Xdefaults

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Wednesday 25 May 2005 12:27 am, Petr Mikulik wrote:
> Consequently, I propose that gnuplot always reads .Xdefaults resources in
> C-locale.

I fail to understand the problem. 
It's your .Xdefaults file - you can put anything you like in it.
Why limit gnuplot by telling it to ingore the user's choice of
environment?
 
> PS: I came to this issue because on my system there is by default
> 	LANG=cs_CZ.UTF-8
> but I run Midnight Commander as
> 	LANG=en_US.UTF-8 mc_lastdir
> so that its menus are always in English. That's not funny if hotkeys change.

Aha.  So I think the underlying issue is that you are using obsolete
syntax for setting the locale.  For a long time now the locale settings
have been split into separate components, and the LANG variable is used
only as a backward-compatibility fall-back.

I think what you want is
	unsetenv LANG
	setenv LC_CTYPE cs_CZ.UTF-8,en_US.UTF-8
	setenv LC_MESSAGES en_US.UTF-8
	setenv LC_NUMERIC C

Individual programs may be buggy, of course, but if they are correctly
calling setlocale() then this should result in using CZ character encodings
if available (with fall-back to en_US), menus and other system messages
in English, and C-language formats for numbers.  You can also set
LC_TIME to choose a prefered time/date format.

> Gnuplot behaves differently if I run it from plain Konsole or from mc,
> i.e. its .Xdefault resources are not portable.

It should be consistent if you set LC_NUMERIC.  If you find out
otherwise, then that definitely is a bug, and we should try to fix it.

I am not an expert on setting locales. I had to figure this all out the hard way,
after installing my current generation of machines to support ja_JP.UTF-8.
I assure you it's at least as disconcerting to have your menus pop up in
Japanese as it is to have them appear in Czech.  But dual-language support
works nicely once you have the various locale settings sorted out.
I love the current versions of Mandrake (now Mandriva), where the KDE desktop
can be installed with SCIM multi-language support.  This is really great
because you can change the effective locale for individual programs
(while they are running!) with a hot keys or a menu command.
(caveat: the programs have to be build with appropriate X-input support,
but that is true for the ones in the Mandriva distro).

-- 
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center
Mailstop 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195