option for specifying lanugage?

[sen_ml@eccosys.com]

thanks for the response.  my comments follow.

On Tue, 11 Apr 2000, sen_ml@eccosys.com wrote:
> is there a way to specify an option to gnupg to get it to choose which
> language its messages are outputed as?  something like the "lang"
> option in pgp.  note: i mean command line option -- not specifying the
> contents of an environment variable.

wk> What's wrong with:

wk> $ LANG=it gpg foo

wk> (assuming a Bourne/POSIX shell)

either my message wasn't clear or i'm not understanding something (or
may be both ;-) )...

one of the paragraphs in my original message that you did not quote
mentions the fact that at least one program (i presume there are more)
has been written to process english gnupg messages.  assuming that
there is more than one non-bourne/posix shell user in the world that
uses that program, isn't it problematic to use the approach you
suggest?

  -having the program forcibly specify /bin/sh seems like a
   waste of starting up an extra process

  -forcing the user to set an environment variable every time they use gpg 
   doesn't make sense

  -writing a custom script that sets the environment variable first also
   requires an extra process

  -having the program try to detect which shell the user uses seems silly

any other ideas?

i didn't come up w/ any so it seemed like having a command line option
to specify language was a good idea -- at least one to tell gpg to use
english messages so that the program that talks to gpg can specify
it (but if you go that far, why not allow the specification of
arbitrary language?).