threads / discuss / 56537

LANGUAGE instead of LANG respected in git?

Subject: LANGUAGE instead of LANG respected in git?

## tl;dr

3 messages between Sep 19, 2021 and Sep 19, 2021.

replies: 2people: 3as markdown or json

Bagas Sanjaya· Sep 19, 2021, 05:04 UTC · lore

Hi,

Supposed that I would like to display `git help` in French (`fr_FR.UTF-8`) language. I ran `LANGUAGE="fr_FR.UTF-8" git help`, and indeed the help is displayed in French. But when I instead ran `LANG="fr_FR.UTF-8" git help`, the help is in English instead of French.

It seems like Git use LANGUAGE to display localized messages instead of LANG (like many other tools do). Why?

-- 
An old man doll... just what I always wanted! - Clara

Junio C Hamano· Sep 19, 2021, 07:08 UTC · re: Bagas Sanjaya · lore

Re: LANGUAGE instead of LANG respected in git?

Bagas Sanjaya <bagasdotme@gmail.com> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Supposed that I would like to display `git help` in French
> (`fr_FR.UTF-8`) language. I ran `LANGUAGE="fr_FR.UTF-8" git help`, and 
> indeed the help is displayed in French. But when I instead ran
> `LANG="fr_FR.UTF-8" git help`, the help is in English instead of
> French.
>
> It seems like Git use LANGUAGE to display localized messages instead
> of LANG (like many other tools do). Why?

That's not Git but your system, most likely GNU gettext, is doing.

Learn to use your search engine before asking questions here.

  https://bfy.tw/Rg6H

which will eventually take you to https://superuser.com/a/392466

Sergey Organov· Sep 19, 2021, 08:53 UTC · re: Bagas Sanjaya · lore

Re: LANGUAGE instead of LANG respected in git?

Bagas Sanjaya <bagasdotme@gmail.com> writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

> Hi,
>
> Supposed that I would like to display `git help` in French
> (`fr_FR.UTF-8`) language. I ran `LANGUAGE="fr_FR.UTF-8" git help`, and
> indeed the help is displayed in French. But when I instead ran
> `LANG="fr_FR.UTF-8" git help`, the help is in English instead of
> French.
>
> It seems like Git use LANGUAGE to display localized messages instead
> of LANG (like many other tools do). Why?

You probably have LC_ALL set in your environment. Neither LANG nor LC_MESSAGES overrides that, while LANGUAGE does.

quote from here:

https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Locale-Environment-Variables.html#Locale-Environment-Variables

"Some systems, unfortunately, set LC_ALL in /etc/profile or in similar initialization files. As a user, you therefore have to unset this variable if you want to set LANG and optionally some of the other LC_xxx variables."

HTH, -- Sergey Organov