[arch-general] locale.conf

[Heiko Baums]

Am Wed, 01 Aug 2012 14:48:02 +0200
schrieb Thomas Bächler <thomas at archlinux.org>:

> > You should be careful with LC_MESSAGES if you use desktop
> > environments which don't have their own language setting like Xfce.
> 
> ?????

I know that you're using KDE, if you haven't switched in the
meantime. ;-)

So, KDE uses its own language setting and doesn't care about the LANG
and LC_* variables.

Xfce doesn't have its own language setting and uses LC_MESSAGES -
unfortunately not LANG - to set the language of the desktop. Maybe I
should file a bug report or feature request to upstream.

> > They use
> > LC_MESSAGES to set their language.
> 
> Of course, that's the point of LC_MESSAGES. What else would it do?

Well, actually I would expect that the language is set by LANG and not
by LC_MESSAGES. I would expect, and I guess this is what it's meant for,
that just the output on stdout or stderr is affected by LC_MESSAGES.
That is, that LC_MESSAGES only sets the console output of CLI programs,
but not the language of the whole desktop environment like Xfce and all
the GUI programs. What was the sense of LANG otherwise?

Heiko