Problem with individual locale setting

Doc CPU · 08-17-2012, 03:34 AM

Hi there,

on my desktop PC I'm running Linux Mint 12 (Lisa) using the MATE desktop. The system's locale is basically en_US.utf8. For a long time, I had the assignment

Code:

LC_COLLATE="C"

in my /etc/default/locale file, which worked fine: In most applications, including the Caja file manager (successor of Nautilus), items were now sorted the way I would expect, that is, according to their character code and nothing else.

Now recently I decided to add

Code:

LC_TIME="en_DK.utf8"

which would -according to many posts across the internet- make the system use the ISO format for dates (YYYY-MM-DD).

Now I see that the date format is what I want it to be; however, the sort order reverted to the original weird order, not the "pure" C sorting any more. When I issue a 'locale' command, it displays:

Code:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US:en
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME=en_DK.utf8
LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

Obviously, adding the LC_TIME line in /etc/default/locale makes my system ignore the LC_COLLATE. The order of these two lines doesn't make a difference (hadn't expected one, though).

What's happening here? What am I doing wrong? All I want is to have LC_COLLATE="C" and LC_TIME="en_DK.utf8" effective at the same time.

Thank in advance for any helpful hint.

[X] Doc CPU

Doc CPU · 09-01-2012, 09:04 AM

Hi there,

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doc CPU

What's happening here? What am I doing wrong? All I want is to have LC_COLLATE="C" and LC_TIME="en_DK.utf8" effective at the same time.

two weeks have passed, and nobody's been able to give a clue. What a pity.
I'm not putting any of you under pressure, am I? ;-)

Well, I still haven't any idea what's going wrong on this particular PC. However, I have some additional information.
I tried to set up the same locale configuration on two systems running Mint 13 (Maya), and it works as expected there.
I tried the same on another system running Mint 12 (Lisa), and it worked on that system, too.

So obviously there's some misconfiguration on my main system that causes the silent conflict between LC_COLLATE="C" and LC_TIME="en_DK.UTF-8", but I can't pinpoint what it is. Besides, I can't make out where that weird LANGUAGE=en_US:en in the output of locale comes from, nor what it means (especially the colon). I'm also confused that some variables that locale displays are in quotes, and some are not. Maybe that's not meaningful, but it seems strange anyway.

[X] Doc CPU