Erronous "unsupported locale setting" ?

[robert]

Why can the default locale not be set by its true name? but only by '' ? :


PythonWin 2.5 (r25:51908, Sep 19 2006, 09:52:17) [MSC v.1310 32 bit (Intel)] on win32.
>>> import locale
>>> locale.getlocale()
(None, None)
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL,"de_DE")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<interactive input>", line 1, in <module>
  File "C:\Python25\lib\locale.py", line 476, in setlocale
    return _setlocale(category, locale)
Error: unsupported locale setting
>>> locale.getdefaultlocale()
('de_DE', 'cp1252')
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL,locale.getdefaultlocale())
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<interactive input>", line 1, in <module>
  File "C:\Python25\lib\locale.py", line 476, in setlocale
    return _setlocale(category, locale)
Error: unsupported locale setting
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL)
'C'
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL,'')
'German_Germany.1252'
>>> locale.getlocale()
('de_DE', 'cp1252')
>>>