Version Control with Subversion, 2nd Edition

Localization

Localization is the act of making programs behave in a region-specific way. When a program formats numbers or dates in a way specific to your part of the world or prints messages (or accepts input) in your native language, the program is said to be localized. This section describes steps Subversion has made toward localization.

Understanding Locales

Most modern operating systems have a notion of the “current locale”—that is, the region or country whose localization conventions are honored. These conventions, typically chosen by some runtime configuration mechanism on the computer, affect the way in which programs present data to the user, as well as the way in which they accept user input.

On most Unix-like systems, you can check the values of the locale-related runtime configuration options by running the locale command:

$ locale
LANG=
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_ALL="C"
$

The output is a list of locale-related environment variables and their current values. In this example, the variables are all set to the default C locale, but users can set these variables to specific country/language code combinations. For example, if one were to set the LC_TIME variable to fr_CA, programs would know to present time and date information formatted according to a French-speaking Canadian’s expectations. And if one were to set the LC_MESSAGES variable to zh_TW, programs would know to present human-readable messages in traditional ...