Re: gettext locale environment variable documentation

[Bruno Haible]

Hello Karl,

> I could argue more about the exact semantics of the exact words used,
> but it seems silly.  Humans are not computers, and if a little rewording
> will help humans understand the situation better, even if the original
> could be construed as technically "correct", what's the harm?

Very simple: If the text emphasizes that a language code is _usually_
two-letter, then someone "clever" finds out that ISO-639 has also three-
letter language codes like "eng" for English, "ger" for German, etc.,
and tries to use LANG=ger_DE. So the text has to exclude this case explicitly,
and say that the three-letter code can only be used when no two-letter code
exists. Then comes the next "clever" person and asks about freshly added
two-letter codes for which a three-letter code already existed. And so on.

This chapter is a user's manual, not a reference manual. And in a user's
manual, I think, it's more important to get 99% of the use cases described
in one paragraph, than 100% in two paragraphs.

In real life, most people will be told about their locale either by friends
or by the system, and rarely have to discover it on their own. Therefore
it is not important to achieve completeness in this section.

Bruno