Re: Li18nux Locale Name Guideline Public Review
>>>>> "David" == David Starner <starner@okstate.edu> writes:
David> But a bad standard, that's hard to implement or is painful
David> to use, will drive away users and implementers, and
David> discourage the creation of a new standard.
Come live with the lack of standard conformance in Japan, is all I can
say. Take a look in /usr/share/locale/locale.alias, for just one
example :-(. Having more locale aliases than any other country
doesn't strike me as something an alleged technological power should
be proud of.
David> But we're talking about locale charsets, the charsets that
David> every program can be expected to handle, the master
David> charsets for a user.
That may be what you are talking about. That's not what the standard
is for.
Read the Q and A document. Yes, they recommend strongly that
implementations provide locales corresponding to the standard names
that are actually in use. But quite clearly the main requirement is
that _if_ you provide support a locale, it should be accessible via
the standard name. And that if you respond affirmatively to a request
for a locale with a standard name, you'd better deliver the right
thing. That's all.
David> Users should be able to expect that you can send a file
David> from one Linux box to another in the same locale without
David> having to recode it.
They should, but they can't.
The point is that at present, there's no guarantee that any of the
names they thought they knew for their locale will work on any other
Linux system, even if the locale itself exists! Thus the Locale
Name Guidelines.
David> IMO, we have a poorly-thought out standard,
Au contraire. Probably I'll have go eat some words and do some
browsing on their site, it looks like the quality of their specs has
risen dramatically since the last time I looked. How cool!
This draft is a GoodThang[tm]. Small, incremental, but unambiguously
progress. An excellent example of how to go about making a standard.
David> in an area without multiple implementations and hence the
David> need for a standard.
But we do have multiple implementations. The spew iconv --list
presents you with is proof positive that we support "multiple
implementations" of names for most character sets. I'm sure Uli
Drepper would love to have an excuse to get rid of 3/4 of it, even if
it means changing the main glibc name for ja_JP.eucJP to ja_JP.EUC-JP.
--
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