Locale problem

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

The developers of gimp-print have encountered a problem with locales,
please see the letter below. I think any help is appreciated.

Christian


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Locale problem
Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2001 12:45:22 -0400
From: Robert L Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu>
To: menthos@menthos.com, egger@suse.de
CC: andystewart@mediaone.net, roger@whinlatter.uklinux.net,
rl117@york.ac.uk,rlk@rlkppp.tiac.net, mike@easysw.com

Christian or Daniel, maybe you can help us out with a conundrum we're
facing here.

We're trying to translate the CUPS PPD files by using local catalogs.
This works fine on my system (SuSE 7.0, glibc 2.1.3), but not on Andy
Stewart's (SuSE 7.2, glibc 2.2), when I do

LANG=sv ./genppd

or

LC_ALL=sv ./genppd

On Andy's it can be made to work by

LANGUAGE=sv ./genppd

I don't want to do this, because it's GNU-specific, but

LANGUAGE=sv LC_ALL=sv ./genppd

doesn't work either.

Andy did some research last night, and determined that LANG or LC_ALL
is only recognized if the language in question is a legal locale (as
determined by 'locale -a') on the system.

On my system, sv, fr, da, and no are legal locales.  Likewise on the
Solaris 8 systems.  However, Andy's system recognizes "swedish",
"sv_SE", "sv_FI", and "sv_FI@euro" as legal locales, but not "sv".
Meanwhile, the Solaris 8 systems on the Sourceforge compute farm
recognize only "sv" and "sv.UTF-8", not "swedish".

The BSD system there is even stranger; it doesn't even have the
command 'locale', and /usr/share/locale only contains
sv_SE.DIS_8859_15 and sv_SE.ISO_8859-1.  The MacOS system there *does*
have "sv" as a supported locale.

So at this point I'm about to throw up my hands in frustration.
I can't see even the slightest hope of an even remotely portable
solution to this.

-- 
Robert Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu>      http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@uunet.uu.net
Project lead for Gimp Print/stp --  http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton