Re: Updating/adding locale for Ethiopia and Eritrea in GNU libc.

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere at hungry dot com>]

[Daniel Yacob]
> This may or may not get into the libc-alpha list, I'm not subscribed
> so I don't know.  You are welcome to forward it if not.

I believe it made it to the list.

> At the end of this mail is a link to 19 locales for glibc (14 new),
> they are ready for glibc maintainers to evaluate.

Thanks.  I'll try to follow up on them, to get them included.

> This occurred when month and day names were only two chars in
> length.  The space is added to aid columnar formatting.  Doing "ls
> -l" and getting a ragged list drove me nuts, so I added the space.

Right.  I'm not sure if it is a good idea, but it is not for me to decide.

> This ending <U0020> is found in most every locale file (even no_NO).
> I think without it the currency name would be contiguous with the
> digits, one of your examples would become "NOK1 234,56" instead of
> "NOK 1 234,56".

The Norwegian locales are broken, so you should not use it as a
reference.

>> How are the following values written as numbers and currency (using
>> both $ and ETB) in Amharic?
> 
> As numbers:
>   1
>   -1
>   1,234.56
>   -1,234.56
>   1,234,567.89
>   -1,234,567.89
>   12.3456789
>   -12.3456789
> 
> As currency:
>   $1
>   -$1
>   $1,234.56
>   -$1,234.56
>   $1,234,567.89
>   -$1,234,567.89
>   $12.34
>   -$12.34
> 
> The ETB (or "Birr" in Amharic) is generally not used unless the
> context would be ambiguous.  For example, in a government or trade
> document when two or more monetary systems are used.

OK.  Period as decimal point, and comma as group character.

> Generally, the time formats and collation is all I actually test.  I
> don't know how to test the currency formats or other symbols like
> "name_mr", I'll download the latest glibc and look into its testing
> tools.  I've otherwise just checked to see that the formatting
> strings are typo free.

There is a test for numeric and monetary values in the latest glibc.
I have no idea how to test the others.

> I've prepared all of the locales that I am working on here:
> 
>   http://yacob.org/yeha-0.20a.tar.gz

I'll have a look when I find the time.

>   aa_ER-Saaho  (Saaho Dialect)

I suspect the glibc maintainers will want you to register these
languages in ISO 639 before they are include in glibc.

>   gez_ET
>   gez_ER-Abegede  (Alternate Sort Order)
>   gez_ET-Abegede  (Alternate Sort Order)

It would be easier if there was one sorting order.

>   om_ET contains code to extend Latin collation, but Ethiopic
>   collation then breaks. I can't see why, I could use help here.

I need to read up on the locale file format before I can give you any
help.  I'm doing it at the moment.

>   With lang_ab, lang_term, and lang_lib commented out in the "gez",
>   "sid" and "tig" locales, they compile fine under my default RH9
>   libc-2.3.2 setup.  They should be uncommented for testing in the
>   alpha version that would recognize these language tags.

Right.  Probably need a newer version of localedef with the updated
language list.