[luatex] Localisation of Lua or LuaTeX

[Philipp Stephani]

2012/3/2 Ralf Meyer <rameyer at uni-math.gwdg.de>:
> It is remarkable that the names of locales are so system dependent.

Well, they are not standardized (there is the POSIX standard, but that
is of course not universal).

> Even more disturbing, the shell command "locale -a" showed me that my
> computer only knows about several German and English locales.

Yes, localizations have to be manually installed on most operating systems.

> 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.

Depending on what you mean by "does not work."  No part of LuaTeX
depend on the OS locale unless you explicitly write code to take the
OS locale into account.

>
> Should one refrain from using the os library, or at least its
> localisation aspects, and warn users to avoid it for this reason?

The C89 locale functionality is neither platform-independent nor
sufficient.  For serious Unicode or localization work, you usually
want a powerful library like ICU or one of its wrappers, e.g.,
Boost.Locale.