perils of internationalisation

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "CR" == Carlos Ribeiro <cribeiro at mail.inet.com.br> writes:

    CR> While I understand that this problem is inherently connected
    CR> with internationalization issues, it's not an excuse for
    CR> braindead software. We should have some option to change
    CR> localization temporarily for some application, either as a
    CR> software option, or a OS feature. However, this is a *big* job
    CR> that nobody seems to want to do.

On *nix, using the bash shell, this is actually pretty easy.  I've
been doing a lot of Mailman 2.1 testing (the first in which i18n is
officially supported), and although I use en_US as my default locale,
I can test out command line scripts in Spanish by doing something
like:

-------------------- snip snip --------------------
% LANGUAGE=es bin/list_lists
2 matching mailing lists found:
     List1 - descripción: 
     List2 - descripción: 
-------------------- snip snip --------------------

The "LANGUAGE=es" prefix is a bash (and I believe Bourne shell)
feature that temporarily exports the variable LANGUAGE to the string
"es" in the environment of the command, but doesn't change it in the
shell's global environment.

(Note the reason the first sentence isn't in Spanish is that it hasn't
been translated in the catalog yet.)

-Barry