Document the GNU LANGUAGE env var.

p4raw-id: //depot/cfgperl@2645

1 files changed, 20 insertions, 11 deletions

diff --git a/pod/perllocale.pod b/pod/perllocale.pod
index dba15feffe..95aa6af167 100644
--- a/pod/perllocale.pod
+++ b/pod/perllocale.pod
@@ -225,18 +225,18 @@ and see whether they list something resembling these
         english.iso88591    german.iso88591     russian.iso88595
         english.roman8                          russian.koi8r
 
-Sadly, even though the calling interface for setlocale() has
-been standardized, names of locales and the directories where the
+Sadly, even though the calling interface for setlocale() has been
+standardized, names of locales and the directories where the
 configuration resides have not been.  The basic form of the name is
-I<language_country/territory>B<.>I<codeset>, but the latter parts after
-I<language> are not always present.  The I<language> and I<country> are
-usually from the standards B<ISO 3166> and B<ISO 639>, the two-letter
-abbreviations for the countries and the languages of the world,
-respectively.  The I<codeset> part often mentions some B<ISO 8859>
-character set, the Latin codesets.  For example, C<ISO 8859-1> is the
-so-called "Western codeset" that can be used to encode most Western
-European languages.  Again, there are several ways to write even the
-name of that one standard.  Lamentably.
+I<language_territory>B<.>I<codeset>, but the latter parts after
+I<language> are not always present.  The I<language> and I<country>
+are usually from the standards B<ISO 3166> and B<ISO 639>, the
+two-letter abbreviations for the countries and the languages of the
+world, respectively.  The I<codeset> part often mentions some B<ISO
+8859> character set, the Latin codesets.  For example, C<ISO 8859-1>
+is the so-called "Western European codeset" that can be used to encode
+most Western European languages adequately.  Again, there are several
+ways to write even the name of that one standard.  Lamentably.
 
 Two special locales are worth particular mention: "C" and "POSIX".
 Currently these are effectively the same locale: the difference is
@@ -807,6 +807,15 @@ for controlling an application's opinion on data.
 C<LC_ALL> is the "override-all" locale environment variable. If
 set, it overrides all the rest of the locale environment variables.
 
+=item LANGUAGE
+
+B<NOTE>: C<LANGUAGE> is a GNU extension, it affects you only if you
+are using the GNU libc.  This is the case if you are using e.g. Linux.
+If you are using "commercial" UNIXes you are most probably I<not>
+using libc and you can ignore C<LANGUAGE>.  But in the case you are
+using it: it is an even more powerful "override-all" than C<LC_ALL>
+and moreover, it's a "path" (":"-separated list) of locales.
+
 =item LC_CTYPE
 
 In the absence of C<LC_ALL>, C<LC_CTYPE> chooses the character type