Bug#248377: locales: Wrong thousands_sep value in fr_FR locale

[barbier@linuxfr.org (Denis Barbier)]

On Tue, May 11, 2004 at 10:11:11AM +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> [GOTO Masanori]
> > At Mon, 10 May 2004 22:33:51 +0200,
> > Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> > > $ grep ^thous /usr/share/i18n/locales/fr_FR
> > > thousands_sep             ""
> > > 
> > > But the french separator for thousands is a space and not empty
> > 
> > Petter, Denis, should this be fixed?  Note that glibc uses fr_FR
> > defined by ISO sample locale file.
> 
> I have no idea if it is wrong or not.  I notice that the monetary
> formatting in fr_FR uses grouping and space as separator, while
> numeric formating does not.
> 
> I suggest registering the issue at
> <URL:http://sources.redhat.com/bugzilla/>.  Collecting a comment from
> the original locale author, Keld Simonsen, is probably a good idea as
> well.

I would say that thousand separator is U00A0 in French (at least for
fr_FR and fr_CA, not sure for other countries), but did not find
any official position.  Here are some relevant links:
 * in French:
     http://www.olf.gouv.qc.ca/ressources/ti/dossiers/LangueMacOSX.pdf
     http://frenchpro.free.fr/screen.pdf/ALIREscreen.pdf
 * in English:
     http://ftp.fdn.org/pub/CTAN/macros/latex/required/babel/frenchb.dtx
        In French the decimal part starts with a comma and thousands
        should be separated by a space; the same approximation of
        $1000\pi$ should be inputed as |$3\;141{,}592\;653$| in math-mode
        and as something like |3~141,592~653| in text
    (this is self-documented LaTeX code, hence some markup is added.
    Tilda is a non-breaking space and \; is a thin non-breaking space)

But I am not familiar with number formatting with glibc and thus agree
with Petter, the best solution is to report this bug upstream.
Sebastien, are you willing to do so?
IMO mon_thousands_sep should also be changed from U0020 to U00A0.

Denis