| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
farrenheit
n00b
Joined: 20 Jun 2010
Posts: 29
|
 Posted: Sun Mar 27, 2011 7:35 pm Post subject: how important is NLS (native language support)?? |
 |
|
I'm a newbie to Gentoo, finally trying to install it on my system using the LiveDVD now (had been trying in VMware and getting kernel panic errors I think, or VFS errors, can't remember exactly).
I'm editing my make.conf and about to emerge gentoo-sources for the first time.
When I wanted to check out what USE flags were set globally:
I see among the USE flags "nls" for Native Language Support. I feel it's safe to remove this if I never use anything other than English, but I wanted to know if anyone has experienced that nls is needed for some important things, even if I never want another language, and that if I remove nls, it will likely break my system down the road.
Anyone know? I tried searching the forums for "nls" and "native language support" and didn't find much relevant hits. Searching google for "the importance of native language support" didn't help much either. |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
NeddySeagoon
Administrator
Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54220
Location: 56N 3W
|
| Posted: Sun Mar 27, 2011 7:38 pm Post subject: |
|
|
farrenheit,
I think its needed for vfat. Thats all versions of the FAT filesystem. If you will never use VFAT you probly don't need it.
_________________
Regards,
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
NeddySeagoon
Administrator
Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54220
Location: 56N 3W
|
| Posted: Sun Mar 27, 2011 7:40 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Moved from Dustbin to Installing Gentoo.
Sorry about that - I clicked on the wrong button
_________________
Regards,
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
farrenheit
n00b
Joined: 20 Jun 2010
Posts: 29
|
| Posted: Tue Mar 29, 2011 9:37 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| Thanks Neddy. I'm going to use -nls unless I ever run into an issue where it asks me to support it. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
PaulBredbury
Watchman
Joined: 14 Jul 2005
Posts: 7310
|
| Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2011 7:20 am Post subject: Re: how important is NLS (native language support)?? |
|
|
| farrenheit wrote: | | never use anything other than English |
But you will, sooner or later. Unicode is the future and now, because showing a different language correctly is much more useful than showing a string of question marks, even if you don't understand the language - e.g. you could copy-&-paste it into Google Translate, or call over a foreign buddy to look over your shoulder, or at least just have things look less ugly.
Another example: I had to change from lout to texlive, because I need, rarely, to use chars from a foreign language. *Rarely*, mind you, but I need the ability available. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
charles17
Advocate
Joined: 02 Mar 2008
Posts: 3664
|
| Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2014 5:45 pm Post subject: Re: how important is NLS (native language support)?? |
|
|
So seems it's not really important. I've ever since run my systems with -nls as the only USE flag in make.conf.. | /etc/portage/make.conf wrote: | | USE="-nls" |
But what will be the benefit of enebling it? I've read and tried to understand | wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Localization/HOWTO#NLS wrote: | | For message based localization to work in programs that support it, you will probably need to have programs compiled with the nls (Native language support) USE flag set. Most of the programs using nls also need the gettext library to extract and use localized messages. Of course, Portage will automatically install it when needed. |
What is message based localization???
For Firefox, Thunderbird and Libreoffice there is LINGUAS in make.conf, pulling in additional language packages according to the value of LINGUAS. But how does NLS know, which language(s) to compile? In case of more than one, where is the language switcher? Does it at all have to do with language installation?
BTW:
How to get rid of unneeded entries in eselect locale? Is it possible? | Code: | $ eselect locale list
Available targets for the LANG variable:
[1] C
[2] POSIX
[3] de_DE
[4] de_DE.iso88591
[5] de_DE.iso885915@euro
[6] de_DE.utf8
[7] de_DE@euro
[8] deutsch
[9] en_GB
[10] en_GB.iso88591
[11] en_GB.utf8
[12] en_US
[13] en_US.iso88591
[14] en_US.utf8
[15] german
[16] en_US.UTF-8 *
[ ] (free form) |
| Code: | $ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE=C
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= |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Roman_Gruber
Advocate
Joined: 03 Oct 2006
Posts: 3846
Location: Austro Bavaria
|
| Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2014 7:31 pm Post subject: |
|
|
well if you are a german speaker you may need ö => oe, ä => ae and so on. and therefore you may need nls.
i have nls set here and i am normally not a friend of too many useflags. I may be wrong in this regard |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
charles17
Advocate
Joined: 02 Mar 2008
Posts: 3664
|
| Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2014 8:14 pm Post subject: |
|
|
But I have Ä ä Ö ö Ü ü ß é È ê û ô, on framebuffer and on X completely without NLS.
It's all provided by the keyboard layout. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
krinn
Watchman
Joined: 02 May 2003
Posts: 7470
|
| Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2014 12:45 am Post subject: |
|
|
nls is use to translate message of programs, what english user forgot is that native language of a program may not be english, and without nls, you may just endup with a swedish speaking program.
I think english user may still use -nls as the probable number of non-english native language as default are very low.
For accent and specials chars it has to do with characters encoding, as encoding value of chars doesn't produce the same result on different charmaps.
So if you encode ë in UTF-8 you are making sure anyone using UTF-8 will see a "ë" on his display and not the char that is equal to the encoding value of the UTF-8 "ë". UTF-8 is an extend set of ASCII that is more than popular, so the lower part of UTF-8 chars are just ASCII chars ; hence why UTF-8 is also popular.
nls dosen't know which language to compile, it depend on what languages (read translations) exists for a program : if you have a program in english and french, no matter how you force your settings, you will only get english or french with it.
But if a program support 10 languages, using stuff like LINGUAS may drive your choice on which one to use (at first the system choice of your "locale" should be pickup to define the language type of output you want use, but i think the LINGUAS was add to allow a more fine tune choice : your system use english and french as locale, but only display english or french so, while thru linguas you might allow someone to actually have english + french dictionary enable while the program might be default to display in french, it will still allow both dictionaries to be use as you wish while still the program output and menus... are kept in french.
The logical way to reduce your eselect locale list should be reducing your number of support charmap in your glibc.
Something that is tune in /etc/locale.gen file |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
charles17
Advocate
Joined: 02 Mar 2008
Posts: 3664
|
| Posted: Tue Sep 23, 2014 11:57 am Post subject: |
|
|
krinn
Thanks for your really helpful explanation.
| krinn wrote: | nls is use to translate message of programs, what english user forgot is that native language of a program may not be english, and without nls, you may just endup with a swedish speaking program.
I think english user may still use -nls as the probable number of non-english native language as default are very low. |
So it's about the programs' support of the Environment variables for locales according to global settings in /etc/env.d/02locale / the user's settings in ~/.bashrc?
Portage's description of nls USE flag and https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Localization/HOWTO#NLS should explain this a little better.
| krinn wrote: | | nls dosen't know which language to compile, it depend on what languages (read translations) exists for a program : if you have a program in english and french, no matter how you force your settings, you will only get english or french with it. |
Did you mean it would then compile all its languages? And then it would be LC_MESSAGES, being responsible for which language is presented to the user?
| krinn wrote: | The logical way to reduce your eselect locale list should be reducing your number of support charmap in your glibc.
Something that is tune in /etc/locale.gen file |
Yes, I should have read the comment in the file's header. It's (almost) all explained there. Just commented out most of my lines | Code: | $ cat /etc/locale.gen
# /etc/locale.gen: list all of the locales you want to have on your system
#
# The format of each line:
# <locale> <charmap>
#
# Where <locale> is a locale located in /usr/share/i18n/locales/ and
# where <charmap> is a charmap located in /usr/share/i18n/charmaps/.
#
# All blank lines and lines starting with # are ignored.
#
# For the default list of supported combinations, see the file:
# /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED
#
# Whenever glibc is emerged, the locales listed here will be automatically
# rebuilt for you. After updating this file, you can simply run `locale-gen`
# yourself instead of re-emerging glibc.
# de_DE.UTF-8 UTF-8
# de_DE ISO-8859-1
# de_DE@eur ISO-8859-15
# en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8
# en_GB ISO-8859-1
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
# en_US ISO-8859-1 |
And running locale-gen gave me a much cleaner | Code: | $ eselect locale list
Available targets for the LANG variable:
[1] C
[2] POSIX
[3] en_US.utf8
[4] en_US.UTF-8 *
[ ] (free form) |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
Installing Gentoo
