On Sat, Oct 01, 2005 at 12:33:15PM -0400, Derek Martin wrote: > More modern systems may generally ask a user to choose a locale, but > even on those, the default is usually still an English locale. Since neither Vincent nor Alain are native English speakers, perhaps it is worth defining the word "default" for purposes of this argument, since to leave it unclear leaves room for interpretation. [If you've stopped caring about this argument, then by all means stop reading here. There's no other content in this message. =8^) But I figure it might still be important to a few people, so what the hell...] Normally, "default" when applied to configuration of computer software means "compiled in settings, in absence of any user configuration." That is what we usually mean by defaults when we discuss them on this list, and I'm nearly positive that is the definition that Alain was using... It certainly is the one I took him to mean. [Note that I said "usually" -- that does not mean the same as always.] But then, there is a second sense of the word which can be applied as well, so for the sake of clarity, we can qualify the term. What I just described are "system defaults" -- in total absence of any configuration, that's what you get. On Linux and Unix systems, this is ALWAYS a locale of either C or POSIX, unless some off-the-wall Linux distribution has decided to change the compiled-in settings of their glibc... Vincent described a system administrator providing a "default" at installation time... But this is no longer the system default, because a user (the system administrator) has provided some configuration information to the programs which use it. These settings (they are settings, not defaults) now become the default settings for all users. Thus they are defaults in a sense, but they are "user defaults" -- NOT system defaults. Thus, quite literally, what Alain said is 100% accurate: > > Start a full default Mutt on a full default system: It talks > > English. That is, in the total absence of any locale settings, Mutt will use English as the default. This is unquestionably true. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thank the spammers.
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