Comment 7 for bug 926207

To me it looks like different issues are unnecessarily mixed up here.

If I understand it correctly, the response to bug #590108 was to open a way to use two locale names in a few specified cases. For instance:

If a user selects simplified Chinese as the language, followed by Taiwan as the location, /etc/default/locale should contain:

  LANG="zh_TW.UTF-8"
  LC_MESSAGES="zh_CN.UTF-8"
  LC_CTYPE="zh_CN.UTF-8"
  LC_COLLATE="zh_CN.UTF-8"

The proposal in this bug report is to change that, so that the same choices result in these /etc/default/locale entries instead:

  LANG="zh_CN.UTF-8"
  LC_NUMERIC="zh_TW.UTF-8"
  LC_TIME="zh_TW.UTF-8"
  LC_MONETARY="zh_TW.UTF-8"
  LC_PAPER="zh_TW.UTF-8"
  LC_NAME="zh_TW.UTF-8"
  LC_ADDRESS="zh_TW.UTF-8"
  LC_TELEPHONE="zh_TW.UTF-8"
  LC_MEASUREMENT="zh_TW.UTF-8"

Both ways give us (almost) the same end result, and I don't think the change is of a semantical nature. Making the change is still important, since language-selector no longer sets LC_MESSAGES, LC_CTYPE and LC_COLLATE. Future attempts to change the system language from language-selector would else fail.

On 2012-03-19 21:58, Colin Watson wrote:
> If the user says that they speak English and live in Switzerland, what
> is the correct value for LC_NUMERIC?

Leaving Martin's remark aside for now (even if I agree it can be discussed), I suppose it's either of 'de_CH.UTF-8', 'fr_CH.UTF-8' or 'it_CH.UTF-8'. I think I understand the complexity you want to call our attention to, and I'd be happy to discuss it further. But IMO it's a separate matter, i.e. the installer's way in general to deal with localisation, and beyond the scope of this bug.