Marc Waeckerlin
Am Dienstag, 17. Mai 2005 14.21 schrieb Mike FABIAN
LC_CTYPE=zh_CN.UTF-8
Yes, you are completely right, I forgot this. I always did it before, but forgot it this time, because I always have to edit /etc/sysconfig/language after installation. It would be nice, if I could enter this during the installation in YaST, then I would not forget it.
I wonder how the user interface should look like. This is really a very special case, this problem occurs when you want to use Japanese or Chinese and set your main language to something else. This is because Japanese, simplified Chinese, and traditional Chinese overlap in the Han region in Unicode and therefore you have to indicate your font preferences somehow. If one of these languages is your main language already and you do not care about the other CJ languages, there is no problem. If you want to use all Japanese, simplified Chinese, *and* traditional Chinese at once, you have to carefully think about which fonts to use or it won't look nice in GTK and glyphs will be missing in KDE. For other languages than CJ there is no such problem because there is no overlap in the Unicode range. So this problem only affects CJ users who want to set their main locale to something non-CJ. A small group probably. Maybe one could extend the "Expert Language settings" dialog in YaST2 to edit LANG and all the LC_ variables. Currently you can only choose whether to use UTF-8 or not and the value of ROOT_USES_LANG in that dialog. Just making it possible to edit all the LC_ variables in such an expert dialog wouldn't be enough because very few people know that LC_CTYPE affects font settings for example. I.e. such a dialog would need a lot of explanation for each variable: "Set this variable to achieve the following effects: bla bla ..." Would be a complicated dialog. Do you really think this would be useful? Or do you have a better idea?
BTW: (off topic)
1) RC_LANG is setup as "de_DE.UTF-8", but since I live in Switzerland, this should be "de_CH.UTF-8". Also, it seems that "de_CH.UTF-8" is not even an official language setting - why?
What do you mean by "official"? Of course you can set your locale to de_CH.UTF-8 (by editing /etc/sysconfig/language), this locale is supported by glibc and contained in the glibc-locale package. You think it is not "official" just because you cannot set it easily with YaST2?¹
2) Language setup: Here SuSE could definitively learn from (k)ubuntu distribution: There I first choose my language (German), then I get a dialog to choose my country from a list of predefined Countries, for German this is Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxemburg, Belgium and "other". This way, with only two choices, all localization parameters can be setup correctly, i.e. keyboard and time.
I think this would be useful, especially for Switzerland because the
keyboard is considerably different from the German keyboard. I'll try
to talk with the YaST2 developers how much time it would need to
implement that.
Footnotes:
¹ actually you can set it with YaST2 because you can set any
variable in /etc/sysconfig with the YaST2 sysconfig editor,
but I would not call that "easy".
--
Mike FABIAN