On Mon, Apr 02, 2018 at 07:43:23AM +0000, Curt wrote: > The thought provoked in my neurological matter was why there are other > locales at all if UTF8 (the locale of this here .homie machine, BTW) is > "vastly superior for all purposes". > > That leaves no purposes remaining whatsoever for the myriad other > locales. > > If this is indeed so, let's get rid of them, then, (the superfluous > locales) thus lightening our loads in computer life. > > Or are there legacy, corner, arcane purposes for these locales, of which > the hoi polloi (of which I am a card-carrying member) has not to concern > itself?
Yes, there are other computer systems on the planet, and some of them still use various single-byte character sets (ISO 8859-* or WIN1252 or similar). In heterogeneous environments, it is often important for a Debian server to support multiple locales, to fit the needs of legacy client systems. For example, if you're sitting at a legacy Unix system which uses the ISO 8859-1 character set, and you ssh to a Debian system that hard-codes "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" in /etc/default/locale , this will clobber the locale variables that are sent by the ssh client. Then, commands like "man" will generate output containing UTF-8 characters, which will seriously mess up the display on an ISO 8859-1 terminal emulator. (Why "man", or groff or whatever, feels the need to generate non-ASCII characters is beyond me.) This is why <https://wiki.debian.org/Locale> has complicated instructions that DO NOT force an override LANG=... in /etc/default/locale (which is destructive and wrong), but instead use fallback values in /etc/profile and /etc/csh/login.d/lang . This is also why I was probing login.conf and pam_env.conf for the ability to support fallback/default environment variable values in that other thread last week. (Sadly, there is still no known alternative to the login-shell-dependent hackery.)
