Re: Fun with locales

[originally from netbsd-users;
 author is bcc'ed to not get him spammed with replies
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On Fri, Jun 27, 2025 at 14:02:21 -0500, John D. Baker wrote on netbsd-users:

> Some time ago, I learned that for GTK applications to choose "US Letter"
> as the default paper size, I need to set something like "LANG=en_US.foo".
> 
> I chose "en_US.US-ASCII".  That seemed to work.
> 
> Some applications, however, take exception to this locale and throw
> interesting errors.  Namely 'xlock' (x11/xlockmore) fails, complaining
> about "Can't create FontSet blahblahblah,xyzzy" and some of the font
> strings it prints look rather broken.  There also appears to be a typo
> somewhere and it also displays a message with "fonset" (sic).
> 
> It worked fine for another user account on my system, but wasn't working
> any more for my regular account.
> 
> The only change I'd made was setting "LANG=en_US.US-ASCII" in my
> '.xsession' script.  Unsetting LANG entirely allowed 'xlock' to work.
> Setting LANG=en_US.UTF-8 allows it to work also.
> 
> Just a little note about something I observed.

We probably should make sure that all system locales from
/usr/share/locale are also recognized by X11 /usr/X11R7/lib/X11/locale

mrg@, btw, why do we replicate the contents of locale.alias twice,
once with and once without the colon?  The one with the colon is for
libX11.  Do we also expect system locale code (no colon) to process
that file?  A comment in the nls/Makefile and - especially! - a
comment in the generated chimera would be very helpful.  Took me a
while to realize why

  en_US.US-ASCII	 C

added at the beginning of /usr/X11R7/lib/X11/locale/locale.alias
didn't help much...

-uwe