Bug 177244

Summary:	"locale -a" gives misleading information
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	JW <ohtmvyyn>
Component:	glibc	Assignee:	Jakub Jelinek <jakub>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	Brian Brock <bbrock>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	4
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OS:	Linux
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Last Closed:	2006-01-08 14:47:45 UTC	Type:	---
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Description JW 2006-01-08 05:53:40 UTC

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows; U; AIIEEEE!; Win98; Windows 98; en-US; Gecko masquerading as IE; should it matter?; rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050217

Description of problem:
If you type "locale -a" it shows locales with charsets such as "utf8".
But there is no charset "utf8".  There is a "UTF-8" one though.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
glibc-2.3.5-10.3

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.type "locale -a"
2.
3.
  

Actual Results:  C
POSIX
aa_DJ
aa_DJ.iso88591
aa_DJ.utf8
aa_ER
aa_ER.utf8
....



Expected Results:  C
POSIX
aa_DJ
aa_DJ.ISO-8859-1
aa_DJ.UTF-8
aa_ER
aa_ER.UTF-8
...


Additional info:

Just listing directories in /usr/lib/locale is not the right way to enumerate locales.  The directories are named with different shceme to actual character set and used in LC_* environment variables.

Comment 1 Jakub Jelinek 2006-01-08 06:02:00 UTC

That's not misleading info, charset names are canonicalized and e.g. .UTF-8
is equivalent to .utf8, to .UTF8, .utf-8, .UTF______________8 etc.

Comment 2 JW 2006-01-08 06:05:01 UTC

Where is that documented?
Wouldn't it be proper for the user to only deal with offical names (eg UTF-8)
and not various mangled/canocialized names?

Comment 3 Jakub Jelinek 2006-01-08 14:47:45 UTC

Why does it need to be documented?  The locale names are an implementation detail
according to POSIX, and no matter whether you use say en_US.utf8 or en_US.UTF-8
it will work the same.

Comment 4 JW 2006-01-08 22:35:13 UTC

If you do "locale -m" there is no "utf8".
Yet if you do "locale -a" you get a whole bunch of character sets that according
to to "locale -m" do not exist.
It would be nice if "locale -m" and "locale -a" were complete and consistent.