Locale related warning message

[Geert Janssens]

Hi,

Recently I discovered a very weird warning on my test builds. When I open a 
book with a report open, this line is printed in the trace file:

WARN <> Monetary thousands separator is the same as the decimal separator; 
converting '.' to ','

My LC_CURRENCY is set to nl_BE.UTF-8, for which decimals are separated by a 
',' and thousands are separated by ' ' (a blank).

My first thought was some locale misconfiguration, but it's weirder than that 
and I fail to understand what is happening. I'll give you all the pieces of 
the puzzle I discovered so far. Perhaps someone reading this with more 
knowledge of internationalization can explain this better.

And upon closer inspection it's not only a matter of a warning. Some input 
fields are affected too. The register is fine, but for example there's a 
number field on Preferences->Online Banking called "Commercial ATM Fees 
treshold". With the rpm based gnucash, this shows a decimal number using ',' 
while my own builds show the same number with a '.'. I see the same thing in 
the mortgage druid.

So the warning is only one symptom and useful to determine at startup already 
if the build will be affected by the locale bug or not.

The warning by the way is generated by goffice. If I don't have any tabs open 
using goffice (certain reports only), I won't have the warning printed, but 
still the number entry fields show the wrong separator.

And now it gets curious: I have also installed gnucash 2.4.7 via rpm (on 
Fedora 14). If I run that one from the command line, the warning isn't issued. 
But with each and every build in my development tree, the warning is printed. 
I tried a lot of builds: trunk, 2.4.7, 2.4 just before the 2.4 branch was 
created,... And I tried to configure exactly as the rpm version was configured 
(with the exception of aqbanking, but I can hardly imagine this would make a 
difference).

The rpm-based version applies one patch to the sources. It suppresses the 
binreloc disabled warning message. This has no relation to the warning above, 
it simply removes one printf from the sources.

My locale related settings my be a bit unusual:
$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=nl_BE.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=nl_BE.UTF-8
LC_TIME=nl_BE.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE=nl_BE.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY=nl_BE.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES=nl_BE.UTF-8
LC_PAPER=nl_BE.UTF-8
LC_NAME=nl_BE.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=nl_BE.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=nl_BE.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=nl_BE.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=nl_BE.UTF-8
LC_ALL=
$ echo $LANGUAGE 
en_BE.UTF-8:en_BE:en

But with the exact same locale settings the rpm version runs ok, and none of 
my builds do.

So I don't understand why I'm getting this. I even tried to automake, 
configure and build with LANG and LANGUAGE set to nl_BE.UTF-8, it doesn't make 
a difference.

Can anyone perhaps shed some light on this ? Or suggest ways to debug it ?

Thanks,

Geert