[Adduser-devel] Bug#345639: nl_langinfo(YESEXPR) ignores LANGUAGE

[Peter Samuelson]

reassign 345639 libc6
retitle 345639 nl_langinfo(YESEXPR) ignores LANGUAGE, no apparent workaround
thanks

[Claudio Nieder]
> $ env | grep -e LC -e LANG
> LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
> LANGUAGE=de_CH:de_DE:de:en_GB:en

In this setup, a prompt "Is this information correct? [y/N]" does not
work.

- The prompt is localised with gettext, which uses LANGUAGE, so it's in
  German.  The German translator correctly renders it as "[j/N]".

- Parsing the response uses nl_langinfo(YESEXPR), but this uses
  LC_MESSAGES and ignores LANGUAGE, so it assumes en_GB.
  Thus the app checks the response against /^[yY]/.

What is the app (adduser, in this case) supposed to do in this case?
There seems to be no way to ask nl_langinfo for an appropriate string
to display in place of [y/N].  Tollef and I thought YESSTR and NOSTR
might work, but the locales I checked do not define those.  (Chopping
those down to a single character would be problematic anyway, given the
existence of multibyte character sets.)

I appreciate that this seems to be an API deficiency with regard to
handling LANGUAGE consistently, and that makes it a hard problem, but I
also don't see how it can be worked around at the application level.
Except perhaps by explicitly undefining LANGUAGE before calling
setlocale() at the beginning of the program?

Peter
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