I have built an initial set of packages, mostly to convince myself that
nothing too drastic was needed inside the debian/ directory.
These packages are for now here on my box but I
guess I could upload them to Debian's experimental distribution for which the
changelog entry is tagged.
I tend not to install any locales packages on my machines, so I can't really test if the localisation support works -- configure and friends certainly suggest it based on the compile-time messages. So my dear reader, if you are into non-default locales and R, and have a minute, grab the package and try something like
$ LANGUAGE=de LC_all=de LC_MESSAGES=de LANG=de LOCALE=de R
R : Copyright 2005, The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Version 2.1.0 Under development (unstable) (2005-02-27), ISBN 3-900051-07-0
R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
Type 'license()' or 'licence()' for distribution details.
R is a collaborative project with many contributors.
Type 'contributors()' for more information and
'citation()' on how to cite R or R packages in publications.
Type 'demo()' for some demos, 'help()' for on-line help, or
'help.start()' for a HTML browser interface to help.
Type 'q()' to quit R.
> Sys.getlocale()
[1] "C"
> q("no")
As is plain from the above, I somehow failed to tell R about 'de' as an
alternative. However, capabilities() does report
TRUE for attribute iconv, so this should work
... Feedback welcome -- right now, R has po files for de and it so no need
to test other languages.