Re: Unhelpful error message

[John Ralls <jralls ceridwen fremont ca us>]

On Oct 4, 2013, at 8:55 PM, John Ralls <jralls ceridwen us> wrote:

> On Oct 4, 2013, at 7:52 PM, "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg tristatelogic com> wrote:
>
> > I get the following message often, usually (apparently) as a by-product
> > of running some browser (e.g. Firefox) or another (e.g. Opera):
> >
> >   (process:22681): Gtk-WARNING **: Locale not supported by C library.
> >           Using the fallback 'C' locale.
> >
> > I googled it and quite obviously I am far from alone in being frequently
> > annoyed by this message.
> >
> > Would the authors/maintainers of GTK mind very much improving the message,
> > you know, so that it would at least give the user the *name* of the specific
> > offending locale that GTK is actually complaining about?  I mean is that
> > too much to ask?
> >
> > I do believe that that one key piece of missing information would be
> > rather helpful to those thousands of people, including me, who are
> > trying to understand the genesis of this error and also how to suppress
> > it.
> > ______________________________________________
>
> The code in question (at gtk/gtkmain.c:622),
>      if (!setlocale (LC_ALL, ""))
>        g_warning ("Locale not supported by C library.\n\tUsing the fallback 'C' locale.");
> can't see which locale isn't supported. It's set in one or more of the locale environment variables
> (see locale(1)), and is generally the OS's fault rather than Gtk's: The problem isn't that translations
> for gtk aren't available (that would be a gettext call), it's that the locale isn't enabled at the OS level.
> The failure is occurring on every localized application which you run; it's just the Gtk ones which
> are courteous enough to let you know.
>
> To see what locales are set in your environment, from a shell prompt say:
>  env | egrep "(LC|LANG)"
> Then check every locale according to how your distro enables them.
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls