Re: [tlug] Re: Japanese under Linux

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "dstibbe" == dstibbe  <dstibbe@example.com> writes:

    dstibbe> All I want is being able to 'input' japanese text. I want
    dstibbe> all mennus just to be in english.

Menus should be controlled by LC_MESSAGES.  No problem.

    dstibbe> So why do I, to be able to input japanese, have to set my
    dstibbe> locale environment variable LC_CTYPE to japanese ? What
    dstibbe> does the whole locale have to do with me inputting
    dstibbe> japanese text ?

LC_CTYPE is not the whole locale; it determines only the character
encoding and some language-specific aspects of its treatment.  It's
arguable that input method choice and collation sequences should be
separate, but that's life.

    dstibbe> Isn't that simply incorrect use of locales ??

No.  POSIX locales are broken by design, and of course they had
excellent reason for breaking things.  But not so badly broken that
you can't get this right.  POSIX locales don't really have very much
to do with languages, and if you're not monolingual you should assume
that they are going to get in your way more than they can help
anything.  They're mostly designed to switch between environments that
don't understand more than one encoding.


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