Title: L10N USE_EXPAND variable replacing LINGUAS Author: Mart Raudsepp Author: Ulrich Müller Content-Type: text/plain Posted: 2016-06-19 Revision: 1 News-Item-Format: 1.0 The L10N variable is replacing LINGUAS as a USE_EXPAND, to avoid a conceptual clash with the standard gettext LINGUAS behaviour. L10N controls which extra localization support will be installed. This is commonly used for downloads of additional language packs. If you have set LINGUAS in your make.conf, you most likely want to add its entries also to L10N. Note that while the common two letter language codes (like "de" or "fr") are identical, more complex entries have a different syntax because L10N now uses IETF language tags. (For example, "pt_BR" becomes "pt-BR" and "sr@latin" becomes "sr-Latn".) You can look up the available codes in profiles/desc/l10n.desc in the gentoo tree. A detailed description of language tags (aka BCP 47) can be found at: https://www.w3.org/International/articles/language-tags/ After a transition time for packages to be converted, the LINGUAS environment variable will maintain the standard gettext behaviour and will work as expected with all package managers. It controls which language translations are built and installed. An unset value means all available, an empty value means none, and a value can be an unordered list of gettext language codes, with or without country codes. Usually two letter language codes suffice, but can be narrowed down by country codes with a "ll_CC" formatting, where "ll" is the language code and "CC" is the country code, e.g., "en_GB". Some rare languages also have three letter language codes. Note that LINGUAS does not only affect installed gettext catalog files (*.mo), but also lines of translations in an always shipped file (e.g., *.desktop). If you want English with a set LINGUAS, it is suggested to list it with the desired country code, in case the default is not the usual "en_US". It is also common to list "en" then, in case a package is natively written in a different language, but does provide an English translation for whichever country. A list of LINGUAS language codes is available at: http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#Language-Codes If you have per-package customizations of the LINGUAS USE_EXPAND, you should also rename those. This typically means changing linguas_* to l10n_*, and possibly updating the syntax as described above. https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Localization/Guide has also been updated to reflect this change.