Re: belocs-locale-data...localedrake...locales generation

[barbier@linuxfr.org (Denis Barbier)]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2005 at 06:10:57PM +0100, Christian Perrier wrote:
> > > My belocs-locales-data package waiting in the NEW queue for a couple of months
> > > already ships this eo_XX locale data file.  I am reluctant to add eo_* locales,
> > > selecting locales is currently not very user-friendly and adding lots of
> > > locales (since there is no reason to only ship _EN and _FR) won't help.
> 
> 
> (was forwarded to -esperanto which I'm currently reading because of
> the starting translation work for d-i. I suggest followups to go to -i18n)
> 
> Denis, have you considered the idea of trying to port Pablo
> Saratxaga's localedrake which is in Mandrake?
[...]

AFAICT localedrake is similar to (and much more advanced than)
localization-config; it sets many locale-related configuration files,
but does not generate extra glibc locales.

I thought about this Esperanto locale today, and am still not convinced
that generating eo_* locales is the way to go.  This would be done by
picking some LC_* definitions from a "eo" locale (e.g. LC_CTYPE,
LC_COLLATE, LC_MESSAGES and LC_NAME), and missing LC_* definitions
from a valid locale, say fr_FR.
This would be strictly equivalent to setting (though I did not test it)
  LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8
  LANGUAGE=eo
  LC_CTYPE=eo_XX.UTF-8
  LC_COLLATE=eo_XX.UTF-8
  LC_MESSAGES=eo_XX.UTF-8
  LC_NAME=eo_XX.UTF-8
This is IMO much better because there is no compatibility problems.
We need a program to set these environment variables in a config file,
but not LANG only.  The localeconf package has such a feature, but is
unmaintained and many locales bugs seem related to this package.

Denis