Locale - @euro Or @iso885915 ?

Hi.

I thought that the character sets "euro" and "iso885915" were equivalent, and that they were both referring to the ISO-8859-15 set. I just found out the hard way that in SuSE 9.2 some locales are installed as "euro", others as "iso885915:

spaceman@sputnik:/usr/lib/locale> ls -1 | grep euro
br_FR@euro
ca_ES@euro
da_DK@euro
de_AT@euro
de_BE@euro
de_DE@euro
de_LU@euro
en_BE@euro
en_IE@euro
es_ES@euro
eu_ES@euro
fi_FI@euro
fr_BE@euro
fr_FR@euro
fr_LU@euro
ga_IE@euro
gl_ES@euro
it_IT@euro
nl_BE@euro
nl_NL@euro
pt_PT@euro
sv_FI@euro
wa_BE@euro
spaceman@sputnik:/usr/lib/locale> ls -1 | grep iso
en_GB.iso885915
en_US.iso885915
et_EE.iso885915
sv_SE.iso885915

Is this a bug, or is there an explanation for this?

cheers,
spaceman

Okay, I figured it out, I was just confused about the way locales work.

For the record, locale names use the following syntax:
language[_territory][.codeset][@modifier]

That means "@euro" is actually a modifier, and does _not_ select the character set. It is used mostly for LC_MONETARY, to indicate that there are two ways in which monetary values can be formatted: for instance French Francs as the old currency and the Euro as the new one.

For "fr_FR", there are three variations in SuSE's /usr/lib/locale:
fr_FR (using the ISO character set)
fr_FR@euro (same as above, but with euro modifier)
fr_FR.utf8 (using the UTF-8 charcater set)

The most informative source I could find about this is here:
http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg20/doc...ro_Handling.pdf