Mailing List Archive: Re: option for specifying lanugage?

On Wed, 12 Apr 2000, sen_ml@eccosys.com wrote:

> wk> $ LANG=it gpg foo
>
> wk> (assuming a Bourne/POSIX shell)
>

> one of the paragraphs in my original message that you did not quote
> mentions the fact that at least one program (i presume there are more)
> has been written to process english gnupg messages. assuming that

No program should process GnuPG messages; programs should use the
output of --status-fd. If a program needs to process the messages it
should reset the locale variables. The test scripts for example do
this.

> -having the program forcibly specify /bin/sh seems like a
> waste of starting up an extra process

Giving environment variables for a program is part of the shell
syntax. No extra process.

> -forcing the user to set an environment variable every time they use gpg
> doesn't make sense

I can't see a reason to have just gpg emit English messages and other
programs use the locale message version.

> -having the program try to detect which shell the user uses seems silly

Every script uses /bin/sh - it's Posix. Adding just an option to
reset an environment variable is no good design IMHO. I know that you
will now say something about --homedir vs. GNUPGHOME :-(

Werner

--
Werner Koch OpenPGP key 621CC013
OpenIT GmbH tel +49 211 239577-0
Birkenstr. 12 email wk@openit.de
D-40233 Düsseldorf http://www.openit.de