Re: Feedback: Six Nautilus annoyances

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Wed, 2004-02-11 at 22:43, Patrick J. Volkerding wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Feb 2004, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > I can see Slackware going with C, since its a very traditional "old
> > unix" style distro, and its users might not like it when ls starts
> > sorting like normal humans (without them telling it to).
> 
> Now that you mention it, that is *exactly* the reason that Slackware has
> stuck with C as the default -- the sort order in ls.  Of course, if it's
> now breaking all kinds of things then I might be forced to switch to
> setting an en_US as the default, but would rather not.
> 
> As far as I can tell, breakage with C is limited to GTK things.  Could
> this be fixed, or does something about the C locale make that not
> feasible?

Well. The breakage is subtle, and not all of it is clearly breakage, as
opposed to just changing how things behave. 

An important "breakage" with the C locale is that it defaults to a 7bit
ASCII encoding. Converting a ISO-8859-1 string containing high-bit 
characters (such as åäö) to the encoding of the current locale (with
iconv) will just fail. This isn't pure 'breakage', its just doing what
its told. If you were on a terminal which only supported 7bit ASCII this
would be the proper thing to do, and in a system that support 8bit
characters, unless the LANG var is set to something else than C we don't
know which 8bit encoding to use, and some of them don't support åäö.

Another issue is the things the locale expect that may not be as
"normal" users expect. For instance collation (sorting). In the C locale
everything is sorted by ascii values, whereas in en_US a case
insensitive sort is used. Some locales have specific collation rules
too, such as the german sharp s sorting as "ss", and swedish sorting åäö
after z. Other things are affected too. See man 7 locale.

You can also set up a mix of the behaviours. Say:
LANG=en_US (default fallback)
LC_COLLATE=C (traditional sorting)
LC_CTYPE=C (traditional isupper() etc)

You just have to decide what a good default for slackware is. And I
would recommend you to have some way to easily change the default local
during installation.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a Nobel prize-winning voodoo househusband from the 'hood. She's a 
beautiful paranoid magician's assistant in the witness protection program. 
They fight crime!