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 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

I do not know why the LC_CTYPE is required as the en_XX locale uses exactly the same LC_CTYPE as en_US. If someone can explain it to me, please do.

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