http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20517
--- Comment #3 from Jörg Höhle hoehle@users.sourceforge.net 2009-10-30 04:33:17 --- The problem is that Wine can be in LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 with either cp437 or cp850. There should be only one.
The codepage has an impact on some programs and should be set deterministically, so users know what to expect. Here I show that its value depends on the history of language switches, not on the current language setting.
Reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_850 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP437 it would seem that CP850 is a more reasonable default for French and German (perhaps CP437 for LANG=C?), but I don't know what would be best for apps running in Wine.
On the Mac, switching from German to French should be no reason to switch the codepage -- so it seems naively, as I'd expect these two western european languages to use the same codepage. Maybe that's a distinct issue?