Re: Feedback: Six Nautilus annoyances

[Shahms King <shahms shahms com>]

On Tue, 2004-02-10 at 13:25, Eugenia Loli-Queru wrote:
> >>  Please allow to arrange items case-insensitive. I see no reason why 
> >>Kool.txt should be before alpha.doc. Yes, unix systems are case sensitive, 
> >>but this only means that kool.txt is different from Kool.txt not that 
> >>Kool.txt should show before all "k" file names or even worse, before all 
> >>a* and b* words etc. It doesn't make any sense to me. Why the privilige? 
> >>:P
> 
> >This means your locale setup is broken.
> 
> Ok, I just checked it out.
> 
> eugenia athlonxp:~> cat /etc/profile.d/lang.sh
> #!/bin/sh
> # Set the system locale (default C is the same as en_US):
> export LANG=C
> # This setting has been reported to fix some cut and paste
> # problems with GTK2.  If you experience this, try it:
> #export LANG=en_US.ISO8859-1
> 
> So, the language is set to C, and Nautilus doesn't pick it up. I did change 
> temporarily my setup to en_US.ISO8859-1 and it _does_ fix the nautilus file 
> name ordering.  So, is this bug on slackware or on nautilus or Gtk2? Who is 
> responsible on fixing this? Apparently other distros have the same problem 
> as well, not just slackware...
> 
> thx,
> Eugenia

If the sorting problem you were talking about occurs when the LANG=C,
then nautilus is picking it up.  In fact, I would argue that explicitly
setting LANG=C is the broken part.  LANG=C is, essentially, "there is no
locale" or "I have no idea where I am".  The locale is responsible for a
number of things besides just sorting.  It handles numeric formatting,
for one, so setting it to 'C' in non-US locales (like Germany) means
you'll get incorrect thousands and decimal separators, etc.  I can't say
if LANG=C is the same as LANG=en_US but it definitely is not the same as
LANG=en_US.utf8.  My computer definitely sorts as you describe with
LANG=C, but "correctly" for LANG=en_US.utf8

Here are the results of running 'ls -1' in various locales:
[shahms->~/test-dir]$ LANG=en_US ls -1
stest
test
tEst
Test
TEST
utest

[shahms->~/test-dir]$ LANG=C ls -1
TEST
Test
stest
tEst
test
utest

[shahms->~/test-dir]$ LANG=en_US.utf8 ls -1
stest
test
tEst
Test
TEST
utest

It appears the "LANG=C is the same as LANG=en_US comment" is incorrect.
Nautilus exhibits the same sorting behavior as ls in all those
circumstances.
-- 
Shahms King <shahms shahms com>