Why are locales so complicated in linux? Since xhtml defaults to utf8 encoding and python is also heading that way I decided to see if gvim supported utf8. It does. It also mentioned utf8 locale support in both the terminal and X, so I decided to see what locales my system supports. It turns out that glibc stores locales in both /usr/lib/locale and /usr/share/locale. The first one stores the actuall locale stuff and has a bunch of utf8 entries. The other apparently stores the message translations for various apps. Then there is the locale data for X, it gets stored in /usr/lib/X11/locale and /usr/X11R6/share/locale or at least those are the ones I've found. They appear to serve the same functions as the two from glibc. What's making things difficult is that glibc has en_US and en_US.utf8 while X has en_US.UTF-8. Of course both have locale.alias files so...

I just read a note in locale.dir that the utf8 locales may not be working yet in X. Oh well I guess I can play with that some other time.
posted by TechnoMage at 1:19 AM LINK