en_XX@POSIX

This locale attempts to provide a generic international standard locale by adhering to ISO and POSIX standards instead of national ones. One of the main goals is to make system scripting easier by using formats that are very easy to parse.

The language is English because that is the (current) international standard language.

The parts of the locale for which there are no international standards have been chosen in a way to aid the goal of easy parsing, and are usually inspired by common practices. In the absence of any guideline I have chosen according to my own personal preferences. Hopefully these will be acceptable to most users. If not, write me an email and argue your point.

This locale is for anyone who wants their system to transcend national boundaries and erase digital boundaries.

Well, ok, that’s a bit grandiose. Let’s just say that it’s a locale for people, especially coders, who like ISO and POSIX standards.

Usage

Add en_XX.UTF-8@POSIX UTF-8 and en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 to /etc/locale.gen and update your locales with usr/sbin/locale-gen (the repo package does this automatically), then update /etc/locale.conf as necessary, for example:

LANG=en_XX.UTF-8@POSIX
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

The LC_CTYPE provided by this locale is identical to that provided by en_US.UTF-8. Nevertheless, further intervention is required to get everything to work smoothly. There are 2 approaches.

LANG=en_XX.UTF-8@POSIX
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

en_US.UTF-8/XLC_LOCALE: en_XX.UTF-8
en_US.UTF-8/XLC_LOCALE en_XX.UTF-8

en_US.UTF-8/Compose: en_XX.UTF-8
en_US.UTF-8/Compose en_XX.UTF-8"

2013-09-16

• changed %W to %V in d_t_fmt to conform to ISO standards

2012-12-02

• changed d_t_fmt from “%F W%W-%w %T %z” to “%F W%W-%u %T %z”
• changed package name from en_XX to en_xx to conform with naming conventions