On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 12:54:08PM +0000, Eugene Crosser wrote:
> Steffen: can you please be more specific?

I can't, dear Eugene, because you are completely right and i am 
completely wrong.

> I believe that the correct "guessing order" [...]

Well, thank you ... but it would have been better for me to go to 
the kitchen and drink a cup of nice tea before my post!

> I believe that because LC_CTYPE controls only one specific aspect 
> of the locale, it either should not be used at all, or used only 
> as the last resort when locale cannot be determined from LANG or 
> LANGUAGE. I think that the current search order 
> "envvars=('LC_ALL', 'LC_CTYPE', 'LANG', 'LANGUAGE')" is wrong

I really agree with you.
Except for LC_ALL and LANG (and LANGUAGE, but this is non-standart 
for C; it seem to have been pushed forward by the GNU people and 
is documented by Python, however) nothing should be part of the 
evaluation of a getdefaultlocale(). 

(I am personally not so sure about that getdefaultlocale() at all. 
That is, whereas i *may* understand the existence of a 
locale.getpreferredencoding() (but with different semantics as in 
#11022 but that's not of interest here), because you need to setup 
your I/O layer so that it works in the system's environment anyway, 
i personally think that getdefaultlocale() is too much.

I.e. getdefaultlocale() behaves as if setlocale() has been used 
but without setlocale() being used yet. 
This is a fine hint for an application that wants to use the users 
locale settings without using the users locale settings!
Just do a grep(1) on Lib/ ...)

Thanks once again for your kindness!