a central place to define system wide $LANG env should be nice. For example GDM localize of the user interface from the system $LANG env, so right now there is no way to change it w/o editing /etc/X11/startDM.sh.
It is not good idea to setup LANG on the system wide rules.. Specialy in UNIX multiuser environment... Let's users to define the LANG in their home directories in .bashrc or .profile or whatever... Anyway, it's better to have LANG unset for root account, 'cause some "bad" apps do not like this env to be setuped (as oracle and some perl app) But it is clever to use some ACCEPT_LANGUAGES="en cs de ..." variable in make.conf, so emerge will know, what locales user wants to install (kde, glibc and others).. anyway... see the bug #9988 for more discussion... Roman
Every distro has a default lang, some apps (like gdm) needs some sort of system wide lang to be localized. Regarding *really* big multiuser systems, I believe they are a very very very small monority, and I don't see the point in not adding a default env var for it, which can be leave unset for no system wide $LANG specified. Regarding apps with parsing problems with non en_US lang, is better to fix them
Hmmm... can argue here... if no LANG or LC_ALL is defined, system (glibc) uses default values for it ("C" for posix). If some apps cannot work whith this default locale, they are broken! I bet for system account (I mean root) is better to have LANG and other locale variables undefined. I have no idea WHY en_US is the language of choise... :-) If user wants some locale he can specify it in his env!
I was looking at dealing with LANG when I created the new TCSH startup scripts. All other distributions out there have pretty sophisticated language support, and it seems to me that Gentoo has some catching up to do. I didn't include any of the LANG handling in the TCSH scripts though because I don't know too much about how it all works. Maybe we need to find some people who deal with linux in other languages, and who can help setup a good language support?
*** Bug 30504 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 30629 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 9988 ***
