Re: lynx-dev Re: lynx should respect LANG

[Henry Nelson]

> Concretely, "LANG = ja" will be taken to mean EUC-JP, while
> "LANG = japanese" will be taken to mean Shift_JIS.

On Solaris 2.6, LANG can be set to either of those values, and the exact
same lynx binary, with the exact same .lynxrc and lynx.cfg works properly.
In fact, you can set LANG to "C," and lynx still works fine, meaning it
will display properly labeled/written Japanese documents in the requested
DCS and Japanese messages are displayed.  What more does Lynx have to do
that it doesn't do already, wrt CJK?

> expected.  I would assume though that, if the system supports both
> EUC and SJIS, then it supports them in the form of two different locales.
> So one LANG string would be appropriate for one situation, and a different
> one for the other.  Is that not the case?

Yes.  But for matching with the physical terminal or console or terminal
emulation, not with applications.  I chose which locale to use on the
basis of the IP of the machine I login from, not on the basis of what
programs I think I might run in that session.

Cannot forget that we are talking about Japanese, only one language,
but with three basic ways of being encoded.  A different locale, then,
does not mean a different language, only a different encoding.

> Or just install the program correctly, with environment variables, lynx
> binary, and configuration files already "coordinated", if it's to serve
> only one (or a few) local user(s), where requirements don't vary.

For sure!

> the actual terminal or console wants something else.  Not a problem on
> UNIX as long as "sane" $LANG values are used, AFAIK.  (Yes, "japanese"
> as opposed to "ja" or "ja_JP.eucJP" or "ja_JP.ujis" is not sane in this
> sense.)  The common character natively used on UNIX systems, including

Try to set your LANG and setterm to SJIS and then telnet to a Unix system,
or login to your account with the terminal emulator set to receive/send
EUC.  Good luck; you'll need it.  You say that's not sane.  Well, what if
you're stuck with old DOS machines for which the only operable telnet can
receive/send SJIS, no EUC.  You're going to have to set up your account to
use SJIS somehow, otherwise you won't be able to read any Japanese (the
emulator will probably not lock up, as it is likely to do in the opposite
case).  If "japanese" is not sane in certain situations, why is it there?

> And, again, the default for this would be FALSE.  You - as an installer
> or packager - change it only for a target system where "modern" locale
> conventions ("ja", "ja_JP.*", "ja_JP.*" rather than "japanese") are the
> norm.  I expect that includes all modern Linux and *BSD distributions
> for example, am I wrong?

No.

__Henry

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