Bug#265163: locales: locale.alias aliases some names to unsupported locales

[GOTO Masanori <gotom@debian.or.jp>]

At Wed, 11 Aug 2004 19:22:35 -0500,
Branden Robinson wrote:
> Package: locales
> Version: 2.3.2.ds1-15
> Severity: normal
> Tags: upstream
> 
> Some of the locale aliases in /etc/locale.alias map names to unsupported
> locales.  Namely, "eucJP" and "eucKR" aren't spelled correctly per
> /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED, and the "SJIS" codeset isn't supported at all.

There're various points for this issue:

(1) /etc/locale.alias is obsolete.  Upstream said they did not have
    any plan to change it unfortunatelly.  I agreed their opinion.
    Don't use the obsolete /etc/locale.alias file for the recent
    system.

(2) LSB defines the standard locale name.  It's provided as backward
    compatibility for old applications.

(3) At least eucJP is correct and it's still valid.  We defined it
    followed by Japanese vendors group.  EUC-JP and eucJP should be
    available.  eucJP is incompatible with LSB; but LSB is very new
    for us.  eucJP has been used over five years on linux, and it was
    available over ten years on other unix.  At that time LSB and
    openi18n were not existed.

(4) eucJP and eucKR can be handled in the glibc locale internal,
    because gconv-modules recognized it's alias name.

(5) Note that some apt related tools (which is written by Python) got
    this problem with eucJP vs EUC-JP.  It has been corrected.

> I'm attaching two files:
> 
> * A Python script I wrote that found this problem.
> * A patch to correct the problem.  I corrected all but one problem; I had
>   to drop the alias for "japanese.sjis", as adding support for the SJIS
>   character set to glibc is beyond my ability, and I don't even know if
>   that's a desirable solution.

It's sure that dropping japanese.sjis is unacceptable choise.

So, as above reasons, at least I don't accept this patch.  If you have
no objection, I'll close it.

Regards,
-- gotom