> > I'm against this whole locale thing. It needlessly > > complicates groff and will probably fail when reading > > foreign manual pages in a "C" locale.
> That's _already_ a big fail, depending on the language. Not at all. Groff has thankfully remained fairly independent of locale so far. I can delete the entire /usr/{lib,share}/locale hierarchy and groff continues to work correctly as long as the output device supports all the characters needed by the document. I strongly believe that this should remain so. I don't think it's a good idea to have the formatting of a document depend on what locale the user has set, not even considering what would then become of documents containing a mix of different languages. There should exist a way for providing the required information in the document itself in a similar way as (for example) hyphenation patterns are accessed, and there should also be a simple way for the user to augment that data if necessary (similar to the way a user can specify extra hyphenation points as part of the document source code, or provide additional hyphenation pattern files along with the document). Locale should remain a user preference, not a document requirement.