Setting locale via launch daemon - downside to this approach? I have the same problem as in this post here that R started in ESS / Emacs can not set the locales:

R version 3.2.2 (2015-08-14) -- "Fire Safety"
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Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin14.5.0 (64-bit)

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During startup - Warning messages:
1: Setting LC_CTYPE failed, using "C" 
2: Setting LC_COLLATE failed, using "C" 
3: Setting LC_TIME failed, using "C" 
4: Setting LC_MESSAGES failed, using "C" 
5: Setting LC_MONETARY failed, using "C" 
&gt; &gt; options(STERM='iESS', str.dendrogram.last="'", editor='emacsclient', show.error.locations=TRUE)
&gt; sessionInfo()
R version 3.2.2 (2015-08-14)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin14.5.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X 10.11 (El Capitan)

locale:
[1] C

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_3.2.2 tools_3.2.2   
&gt; version
               _                           
platform       x86_64-apple-darwin14.5.0   
arch           x86_64                      
os             darwin14.5.0                
system         x86_64, darwin14.5.0        
status                                     
major          3                           
minor          2.2                         
year           2015                        
month          08                          
day            14                          
svn rev        69053                       
language       R                           
version.string R version 3.2.2 (2015-08-14)
nickname       Fire Safety                 
&gt; 


This is because the locales set in the .bashrc etc are not read anymore by processes started via Spotlight / Finder. 

I have already set the locales in emacs

(setq utf-translate-cjk-mode nil) ; disable CJK coding/encoding (Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters)
(set-language-environment 'utf-8)
;; (set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8-mac) ; For old Carbon emacs on OS X only
(setq locale-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-default-coding-systems 'utf-8)
(set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
(unless (eq system-type 'windows-nt)
  (set-selection-coding-system 'utf-8))
(prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)


but this does not solve the problem.

Now the following solution has been proposed here to set the environment through launchd. 

Now I am asking myself: This solution will set the locales for all processes started via launchd - is there a downside to using this approach?
I can't see any reason why it would cause a problem, but if it did you could always remove it and things would go back to normal. Then, you could use the app specific changes listed further down in the linked answer (which is what I'd use anyway).