Re: Is it OK to write ASCII strings directly into locale source files?

[Carlos O'Donell <carlos at redhat dot com>]

On 07/25/2017 02:20 AM, Mike FABIAN wrote:
> Carlos O'Donell <carlos@redhat.com> wrote:
> 
>> My only argument is that when you are forced to use <Uxxx> encoding it
>> is empirically less likely you'll make a mistake. Like reading a sentence
>> backwards to catch errors since it prevents your brain from filling in
>> the missing information.
> 
> But there are also many mistakes because somebody mistyped code points.
> Several weird typos in things like month names look as if somebody
> mistyped code points.

Ultimately I defer to your judgement as localedata maintainer to create
a workflow that is easy for you and benefits your work.

However, I caution against throwing away the compatibility of our locales
with POSIX, which doesn't seem to allow UTF-8 in the specification.

I would suggest the following:

(a) Documentation:

    File an Austin bug to adjust the text of the standard to allow what
    we want. Effectively documenting the defacto glibc standard which
    uses UTF-8.

(b) New process:

    Post-process the locale source before commit, and enforce, that there
    is an auto-generated comment that contains either the UTF-8 or code
    points, for the author to review before commit. If we wrote UTF-8
    in a special markup comment, and auto-generated the locale entry
    with code points then we would remain mostly compatible with POSIX
    and what we have today (less churn for user tools).

-- 
Cheers,
Carlos.