[luatex] Localisation of Lua or LuaTeX

[Ralf Meyer]

Dear Luigi,

it was as you expected: on my system,
os.setlocale("de_DE.utf8")
has the required effect, thanks.

It is remarkable that the names of locales are so system dependent.
Even more disturbing, the shell command "locale -a" showed me that my
computer only knows about several German and English locales.

Hence a french luatex document a colleague sends me will not work on my
computer because it lacks the necessary locales, and probably my
documents will not work on his computer for the same reason.  This is
really bad news!  One of the great things about TeX is portability.

Should one refrain from using the os library, or at least its
localisation aspects, and warn users to avoid it for this reason?
Should one reimplement the localisation libraries that os.setlocale is
calling in luatex itself, so that users can rely on a common framework
all over the world?

Yours,

Ralf

-- 
Prof. Dr. Ralf Meyer		Bunsenstr. 3-5, 37073 Göttingen
Mathematisches Institut		Tel: +49 551 397774
Universität Göttingen		FAX: +49 551 3922985

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 6462 bytes
Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
URL: <http://tug.org/pipermail/luatex/attachments/20120302/ca6531bf/attachment-0001.bin>