[BioC] Newbie 'rflowcyt' question; problem loading facscan256.fcs (fwd)

[Seth Falcon]

I think a bit of clarification is needed.  

Ulrik Stervbo wrote:
> Can and should I set the locate globally? and how do I do that?

Yes, you can set your _locale_ globally (meaning system wide) or you
can set it for all R sessions.

How to set your locale is OS dependent.  On Linux, take a look at the
LANG environment variable.  But it may be distribution specific.

To force a locale for all R sessions, you can use $HOME/.Rprofile and
put a call to Sys.setlocale there with appropriate arguments (see man
page).

Whether you _should_ do this really depends on how you use your system
and what you want.  For my R installations, I use the "C" locale, but
I very rarely have a need for accent characters in my text, etc.

Nolwenn LeMeur <nlemeur at fhcrc.org> writes:
> We don't think that setting the locate globally is a good idea as it 
> might interfer with other programs.

I think what Nolwenn was trying to explain is that having the rflowcyt
package change the locale setting when the package is loaded is not a
good idea because users may have a specific locale set for good
reason.  A safer alternative is for the data reading function to check
the locale and give an error if an incompatible locale is set (pretty
sure that is any locale other than "C").

Best,

+ seth