[luatex] i18n with LuaTeX

[Patrick Gundlach]

Hi,

I am thinking of using GNU gettext together with LuaTeX. Two questions:

1) (off topic) which environment variable should I check for the current language? LANG? Or is this a "it depends" answer?
2) can I safely assume that this variable from question 1 is not cleared by LuaTeX? The following section in the LuaTeX documentation makes me a bit nervous:

"In stock Lua, many things depend on the current locale. In LuaTEX, we can't do that, because it makes documents unportable. While LuaTEX is running if forces the following locale settings:
LC_CTYPE=C
LC_COLLATE=C
LC_NUMERIC=C
"

If I'd check LANG, can I be sure that texlua (!) does not clear it in some future version?

Patrick