Bug#142072: acknowledged by developer (Re: libc6: pre Euro currencies obseleted too soon)
At 2003/3/31 17:43+0900 GOTO Masanori writes:
> At Mon, 31 Mar 2003 15:53:26 +1000,
> Christopher Yeoh wrote:
> >
> > At 2003/3/11 03:48-0600 Debian Bug Tracking System writes:
> > > This is an automatic notification regarding your Bug report
> > >
> > > Euro currency symbol migration was already over, so it's not
> > > "premature" in these days. I close this bug. You may think
> > > it's not early, but we can't add them non-official currency
> > > symbols...
> >
> > Although Euro currency symbol migration may be complete, many people
> > have historical data which uses the old currencies. I imagine this
> > support will be required for many years.
>
> Do you know the role of int_curr_symbol? Unfortunatelly POSIX does
> not define the obsolete currency symbol.
The initial bug report describes the misinterpretation of the standard
that led to the initial removal of these currencies. FWIW the analysis
of the problem was done by Andrew Josey who is the chair of the Austin
Group, the group who developed and maintain the POSIX.1-2001
specification.
POSIX.1-2001 references ISO4217.
This is in the initial bug report, but just to highlight the important bits
(text following is from Andrew Josey):
The Austin group spec says:
"The international currency symbol. The operand shall be a four-character
string, with the first three characters containing the alphabetic
international currency symbol in accordance with those specified in the
ISO 4217 standard. The fourth character shall be the character used to
separate the international currency symbol from the monetary quantity."
This can take the value of any currency symbol
defined in ISO 4217 -- there is no requirement that this be "valid
for current cash transactions" . I suspect the data in this file
has been drawn from Table 1 of ISO 4217 and has neglected Tables 2 and
Table 3 which are important tables.
I obtained a copy of ISO 4217:2001.
This includes three tables, table A-1 is the Currency and funds code
list, table A-2 is for Funds code registered with a maintenance agency,
and table A-3 lists codes for historic demoninations of currencies,
Table A-1 contains the european countries who have adopted
the Euro, together with the Euro and their other pre-Euro currency
and a note pointing to a timetable when the currency will be withdrawn.
This is not a withdrawal of the currency symbol in the ISO standard.
I would anticipate that a future revision of 4217 will
migrate the DEM, FRF etc to Table A-3.
Implementations that are disallowing currency symbols now obsoleted
by the Euro are doing so in error . The DEM and FRF symbols
are listed in 4217:2001.
I anticipate that the current European currencies presently
in Table 1 in ISO 4217:2001 will migrate to table 3.
Limiting this to "valid" currencies as in what is valid for cash
transactions does not allow for historical processing applications nor the
fact that the central banks plan to continue accepting certain currencies
even though they are not the valid cash for a particular currency.
> Moreover, who or what program does this use?
Well I can guarantee that the LSB certification test suite won't even
install properly without support for these locales :-)
> > This is one feature that is
> > required for Debian to be LSB compliant.
>
> I don't know about LSB compliant well, but I don't think this issue is
> required for LSB. I'm surprised if it were necessary. Which
> documents did you refer to?
The LSB spec references POSIX which in turn references ISO4217.
Regards,
Chris
--
cyeoh@au.ibm.com
IBM OzLabs Linux Development Group
Canberra, Australia
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