Polish Git

With one of the latest Debian updates, Git on my system started speaking Polish, my native language. Lightly put, it’s uncanny (or straight crazy) to read about “gałęzie” instead of branches and about “rzeczy do złożenia” instead of things to commit. I am not sure if Polish translation is particularly bad or if the problem is that my mental model of CVS-es and programming in general is English, but after reading old and supposedly familiar output of git status, I was totally lost and had to compare it with its English counterpart to make sure that they say about the same things.

Fortunately the fix is easy. All we have to do is one alias or shell function:

alias git="LANG=C.UTF-8 git"

This won’t work inside scripts¹. I’m fine with that because I don’t use porcelain git commands in scripts, but , if we really wanted to create a universal solution, then we’d need a script in our $PATH.

#!/usr/bin/sh
export LANG=C.UTF-8
/usr/bin/git "$@"