Re: Lack of locales in build environment

[Federico Beffa <beffa@ieee.org>]

John Darrington <john@darrington.wattle.id.au> writes:
>     (i) we already are at 7 (4+3) packages requiring an UTF-8 locale
>
> Then that is a bug which should be filed against those pacakges.

I just discovered the problem with the "scipy ecosystem" packages
today and intended to fix them. But, before submitting changes, I wanted
to check with the ML.

If we decide to keep the status quo, then I will fix the
packages. Otherwise, if we introduce a default UTF-8 locale or implement
Andreas's suggestion, I will file a bug to avoid forgetting.

>
>      (ii) This is another small step in
>      making maintenance easier by providing an environment setting that
>      sometimes helps.
>
> It sounds like a slippery slope.  If we shovel in everything into the defaults,
> that might possibly help somebody do something, someday we'll end up with a very
> bloated system.

The C locale is really an ancient relict. I think adding a more
modern default locale to the build environment doesn't really bloat the
system.

>
> The C locale is the canonical locale. UTF-8 is not the only characater encoding in
> the world.  English is not the only language in the world, and US English is not
> the only dialect of English.

I'm not a native english speaker and I understand the problem very
well. In spite of this I do not know of any package providing
documentation in other languages than english. That's the reason for
suggesting a default locale of en_US.UTF-8 for the build systems.


Regards,
Fede