Re: de_DE has been using the wrong group separator for over 18 years

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

On 04/19/2018 03:55 AM, Florian Weimer wrote:
> On 04/18/2018 11:10 PM, kdex wrote:
>> Hence, the point is less that locale users need the ability to have
>> U+2009 mapped on their keyboards somewhere, but rather that users
>> should be able to input regular numbers and rely on their software
>> to use their system locale to figure out how their numbers should
>> be displayed according to the current locale.
> 
> But that's not how people enter numbers in their word processor.
> 
> U+2009 also has the wrong line breaking property in the basic Unicode
> line breaking algorithm <https://unicode.org/reports/tr14/>, so it
> makes it quite hard for word processors to do the right thing even if
> the user managers to enter this character.

We use U+202F now.

There is some history here with regard to U+2009.

I reviewed the es_MX case for thousands_sep becoming U+2009, and I wrote
to the Mexican government, and reviewed the relative standards and
cultural use cases, but I did *not* consider the impact on the ability for
users to type or the line-breaking aspects of the change (nor do I think
the standard covered these problems).

It seemed like U+2009 was the right choice, but this resulted in swbz#20756:
https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=20756

And Mike Fabian fixed this after my review and we now use Narrow non-breaking
space (U+202F).

So you could use U+202F, but it seems like this is just wishful thinking on
the part of standards. Just like how Canada claims to follow ISO 8601 everywhere
and then doesn't.

I agree with the sentiment that these should be "trailing standards" that
define existing practice.

Where existing practice matches government standards, you are assured that
there has been consensus and can adjust the locales to match.

-- 
Cheers,
Carlos.