Re: Yet another locale question....

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

>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Breen <jwb@example.com> writes:

    >>> LANG="ja_JP.utf8"

    Jim> 	But doesn't this mean that (a) all POSIX compliant
    Jim> apps will switch to Japanese messages if they can,

Only if neither LANGUAGES or LC_MESSAGES is set.

    Jim> (b) only Japanese IMs will start?

Only if LC_CTYPE is not set (which is a bug IMHO).  And this is in
practice; there is nothing in POSIX which prevents an app from
switching on the fly.  POSIX is just optimized for the common
monolingual case.

    >>> LANGUAGES="swedish german english"

    Jim> 	For Gnu packages only.

LC_MESSAGES only allows your first choice, but that's typically
enough, and your _last_ choice, as long as it's English.  That is, you
always implicitly get English as fallback, since the English message
is the hash key for the database.  (Could be anything, but it's
English in practice.)

    Jim> Has no effect on IMs, AFAIK.

True.

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