--- On Wed, 10/11/10, Ken Thomases ken@codeweavers.com wrote:
I should have been clearer. The output just reflects your environment. So, you have LANG set to en_GB.utf8. I had LANG set to en_US.UTF-8. My only point was to say that the "UTF-8" form is acceptable. It was not to suggest that "utf8" is not, nor that one or the other is a standard.
The real question is: does the Linux C library accept 'UTF-8' in the environment variables? I believe it does, which is useful because that's what Mac OS X requires. (It doesn't accept "utf8".)
For example, the following reports just fine on some Linux systems here:
LC_ALL=en_GB.UTF-8 locale
As does your case:
LC_ALL=en_GB.utf8 locale
But the following both produce some diagnostics indicating that the C library is choking on the value:
LC_ALL=en_GB.bogus locale LC_ALL=en_GB.UTF-9 locale
I take this to mean it's a legitimate test of whether a value is valid. Further, it indicates that (at least some) Linuxes take either form.
On my system (fedora 14 x86_64), the valid locales are stored in: /usr/share/X11/locale/ and part of libX11-common
together with /usr/share/X11/locale/locale.alias which defines aliases (like the lowercase/uppercase with without "-" above).
I had an impression that these things used to be glibc-common or glibc-locale, but it seems that they have moved.