[solved] man pages now show in another language!

[batistuta]

I have my system installed with four different locale:
- English
- Italian
- Spanish
- German

Yes, I do write docs and emails in all four languages so I need them all
But the wierd thing is that now all my man pages show up in Italian. I would like to have them back in English. So my question is, how do you configure the default language for man pages?

the --help option always that you can provide to commands still show up in English, it is just the man pages that don't.
This brings up another quesiton, how do you change the language of bash itself? I don't want to, it's just for curiosity...
thanks

[01mf02]

I have the entry

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sys-apps/man-pages -nls

in my /etc/portage/package.use to get rid of all translations of the official man pages - which means all official man pages are shown in English.

EDIT: Oh, and bash itself is English, and I think you can't change that.

[SirYes]

But the wierd thing is that now all my man pages show up in Italian. I would like to have them back in English. So my question is, how do you configure the default language for man pages?

the --help option always that you can provide to commands still show up in English, it is just the man pages that don't.
This brings up another quesiton, how do you change the language of bash itself? I don't want to, it's just for curiosity...
thanks

Is it possible that changing one of the variables mentioned in the Gentoo Linux Localization Guide can help you?

And out of curiosity, what does:

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$ locale

tell you?

Edit:
I've found that running man this way:

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LC_ALL=en man bash

should display manual pages in English.

So, how about putting

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alias man='LC_ALL=en man'

in your ~/.bashrc ?

[batistuta]

Thanks guys for the suggestions

I have the entry

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sys-apps/man-pages -nls

in my /etc/portage/package.use to get rid of all translations of the official man pages - which means all official man pages are shown in English.

Good tip! I will try that. I really don't care about man pages in anything than English. I understand man pages better in English than in my mother tonge

locale outputs

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mafalda ~ # locale
LANG=en_US.utf8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.utf8"
LC_TIME="en_US.utf8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.utf8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.utf8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.utf8"
LC_NAME="en_US.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.utf8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.utf8"
LC_ALL=en_US.utf8

So everything looks fine

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LC_ALL=en man bash

shows pages in the same language as man bash. Let me explain better:
"man ln" shows man page in italian
"man bash" shows man page in english
"man man cp" shows page in italian
the point is that the language is not alteres with LC_ALL=en
that is,

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LC_ALL=en man cp

is still in italian

My question about changing the language of bash was for example in terms of output messages. I've seen people's gcc output in other languages, and I was wondering how does one do that, just for curiosity

I will try putting that use flag and emerge --newuse world
Thanks

[SirYes]

Heck, no!

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mafalda ~ # locale
LANG=en_US.utf8

All should be fine, just FIX YOUR LOCALE SETTING.
"en_US.utf8" is incorrect, it should be "en_US.UTF-8" !

Once I thought the same and I have been corrected by developers

Edit:
The relevant bug is [bug=113233]#113233[/bug].
The recommended reading is Using UTF-8 with Gentoo.

There are lots of bugs with ".utf8" in comments area.

[batistuta]

but I've thought that you *create* the locale with whichever name you want. For instance

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mafalda # locale -a
C
de_DE
de_DE@euro
de_DE.utf8
en_US
en_US.utf8
es_AR
es_AR.utf8
es_ES
es_ES@euro
es_ES.utf8
it_IT
it_IT@euro
it_IT.utf8
POSIX

So my next question would be: how do I remove locale?
I've found this locale shit really frustrating, docs contradict themselves more than George Bush
thanks

[batistuta]

I've tried editing my changing the /etc/env.d/02locale file to reflect the UTF-8 rather than utf8, run anv env-update and now locale shows

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mafalda batistuta# 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="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=en_US.UTF-8
mafalda batistuta# 

but locale -a still shows the same as before, with utf8. What the hell?
I've also done a locale-gen and it seems to generate the right locales

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mafalda batistuta# locale-gen
 * Generating 13 locales (this might take a while) with 1 jobs
 *  ( 1/13) Generating en_US.ISO-8859-1 ...                               [ ok ]
 *  ( 2/13) Generating en_US.UTF-8 ...                                    [ ok ]
 *  ( 3/13) Generating de_DE.ISO-8859-1 ...                               [ ok ]
 *  ( 4/13) Generating de_DE.ISO-8859-15@euro ...                         [ ok ]
 *  ( 5/13) Generating de_DE.UTF-8 ...                                    [ ok ]
 *  ( 6/13) Generating es_ES.ISO-8859-1 ...                               [ ok ]
 *  ( 7/13) Generating es_ES.ISO-8859-15@euro ...                         [ ok ]
 *  ( 8/13) Generating es_ES.UTF-8 ...                                    [ ok ]
 *  ( 9/13) Generating it_IT.ISO-8859-1 ...                               [ ok ]
 *  (10/13) Generating it_IT.ISO-8859-15@euro ...                         [ ok ]
 *  (11/13) Generating it_IT.UTF-8 ...                                    [ ok ]
 *  (12/13) Generating es_AR.ISO-8859-1 ...                               [ ok ]
 *  (13/13) Generating es_AR.UTF-8 ...                                    [ ok ]
 * Generation complete
mafalda batistuta #    

but locale -a doesn't make any sense

[SirYes]

I've found this locale shit really frustrating, docs contradict themselves more than George Bush
...
locale -a still shows the same as before, with utf8.

Yeah, I know, it's sad. It really was utf8 once, but it is changed to UTF-8 now in all Linux distributions I know.

I wouldn't bother about the output of "locale -a". If the "en_US.utf8" is its internal representation, so be it. What matters is how one can select a locale of choice. And all the locale settings come from glibc, BTW. Just look at this file to check what locales are supported and could be generated/installed in the system:

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# less /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED

Anyway, I was going to ask if your problems with "man" are still there? I re-checked the behavior of man and came to the conclusion that:

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$ LANG=en LC_ALL=en man command

should always do exactly as told: display manual page in English.

[batistuta]

SirYes,

After

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sys-apps/man-pages -nls 

now all the pages show in English. I think I understand a bit better now how this locale work. Really confusing the output of locale -a, and I think this is the reason why many docs contradict each other.
But everything seems to work now. I'll mark as solved.
Thanks a lot for your help!!