[PATCH] kernel32: Respect the LANG environment variable on Mac OS.

[Ken Thomases]

On Dec 9, 2009, at 1:34 PM, Ken Thomases wrote:

> So, I'm making a new proposal: the Mac formats region will be used  
> to set LANG unconditionally.  (Passing 1 for the third argument to  
> setenv() rather than 0.)  The current code for overwriting  
> lcid_LC_MESSAGES will be tweaked.  Instead of looking at whether  
> lcid_LC_MESSAGES has been set to something other than lcid_LC_CTYPE,  
> it will look at whether LC_ALL or LC_MESSAGES were set in the  
> environment.  If they were, it leaves lcid_LC_MESSAGES alone.  If  
> they were not, it overwrites it using the existing method.


Now I've reconsidered a bit more.  I'm not going to overwrite LANG  
unconditionally.

For most of this discussion, I've been pretty hostile toward LANG.   
The main problem with it is that Terminal.app sets it, this setting is  
based on region and not language, and therefore if we honor LANG for  
LC_MESSAGES, the user gets the wrong language.

Given that we're going to continue overwriting lcid_LC_MESSAGES using  
the Mac OS X settings, just under different conditions than  
previously, Terminal's LANG is not so problematic.  In fact, it's  
likely exactly equal to what our code will now generate for LANG.   
(Gert's reporting shows that Terminal sometimes doesn't set LANG at  
all and only sets LC_CTYPE, because it detects that the region doesn't  
have a valid locale definition for the C library.  In this case, Wine  
will set LANG, because it isn't already set, but that will be invalid  
and everything will default to the C locale, including LC_CTYPE.  This  
actually loses information.  Unfortunately, there's not much we can do  
about that.  Wine has to set LANG if it isn't set because, for  
example, Tiger's Terminal.app does not make any attempt to set locale  
environment variables.)

The big change between now and the beginning of this debate is that we  
must acknowledge that the way to tell Wine to behave differently (e.g.  
to test other languages and locales) is to set LC_ALL or the  
individual LC_* variables.  I still maintain that setting LANG has  
never been the right approach for that.  And setting LANG will  
continue to be an incomplete override on the Mac (it won't get  
LC_MESSAGES), as it is on Linux for a user with an LC_* in his or her  
everyday environment.

-Ken