Bug#1013946: lintian: wrongly report unknown-locale-code ber
Axel Beckert <abe@debian.org> writes:
> Hrm, a serious thought on this: Why not implement both variants?
> What if we
> * make unknown-locale-code look at ISO 639-1, 639-2, 639-3 and even
>   639-5 for generally valid codes, and then
> * add a new, maybe pedantic-level warning which is only emitted if a
>   language group is used in a locale name, i.e. check locales against
>   ISO 639-5 and if one of these (which IIRC include the language groups
>   present in ISO 639-2) is used as locale, we emit a tag which might
>   be named locale-uses-language-group-code or similar?
> This currently sounds if it would make use of all our arguments for
> and against including ISO 639-2, would be backwards compatible and
> more precise and helpful.
Oh, this is a great idea.  I like this.  That way if someone is using a
language group on purpose, such as in this case, they can just override or
ignore the tag.
FYI, the only tags found in 639-2 that are not in 639-3 plus 639-5 are:
    {
      "alpha_3": "cnr",
      "name": "Montenegrin"
    },
    {
      "alpha_3": "him",
      "name": "Himachali languages; Western Pahari languages"
    },
    {
      "alpha_3": "qaa-qtz",
      "name": "Reserved for local use"
    },
According to https://iso639-3.sil.org/code/cnr, cnr is in 639-3, so the
iso-codes data for it may be out of date.  Likewise, him is apparently now
in 639-5.
The conclusion I'd draw from that is that there's probably no need to add
639-2 if you include both 639-3 and 639-5, and it may be simpler to just
ignore it.
-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)              <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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