Meaning of LC_IDENTIFICATION environment variable

Question

Just out of curiosity, what is the meaning of LC_IDENTIFICATION?

The reason I am asking is, that a fresh US-English installation of Linux Mint (I guess Ubuntu would be the same), located in “Jerusalem” for time zone, left me with the following mix and match locale in /etc/default/locale:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=he_IL.UTF-8
LC_TIME=he_IL.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=he_IL.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=he_IL.UTF-8
LC_NAME=he_IL.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=he_IL.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=he_IL.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=he_IL.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=he_IL.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

As I was working to fix it to my liking, I was wondering if I should also update LC_IDENTIFICATION.

The man page for locale(1) says “Metadata about the locale information”, but it does not tell me exactly what the effect of changing it would be. Can you think of any application or API using this variable and how?

Answer 1

It appears that by setting LC_IDENTIFICATION you indeed supply metadata for a given locale specification, as seen in this example of the Uzbekistan locale:

LC_IDENTIFICATION
title      "Uzbek (latin) locale for Uzbekistan"
source     "Bobir Ismailov"
address    ""
contact    "Bobir Ismailov, Pablo Saratxaga, Mashrab Kuvatov"
email      "[email protected], [email protected], [email protected]"
tel        ""
fax        ""
language   "Uzbek"
territory  "Uzbekistan"
revision   "0.5"
date       "2003-06-27"

Or another variant with the Greek locale:

LC_IDENTIFICATION
title      "Greek locale for Greece"
source     "RAP"
address    "Sankt Jorgens Alle 8, DK-1615 Kobenhavn V, Danmark"
contact    ""
email      "address@hidden"
tel        ""
fax        ""
language   "Greek"
territory  "Greece"
revision   "1.0"
date       "2000-06-29"

LC_IDENTIFICATION is a GNU extension. I could not find a specification of it though. Since it's just metadata, I'm assuming it's not used in any userland programs.