Do locales contain information about preferred units for temperature, lengths, etc. on Unix/Linux? Is it possible to access these properties from Python? I checked out the "locales" module, but didn't find anything suitable.
I'd like my application to automatically convert values into the most suitable unit.
For what it's worth, KDE offers a choice of "Metric" or "Imperial" as the standard unit system, so I would presume that it's possible to access that information through Python somehow.  Gnome might have a similar setting, I'm not sure... but I don't think there's any equivalent for a generic UNIX/Linux system.
The most recent version of SciPy (0.7) includes a module for unit handling, and you can use that to do your conversions if necessary.
Locales and temperature/length conversion