Re: Incorrect days of the week in ru_UA locale

[Keld Simonsen <keld at keldix dot com>]

On Thu, Oct 03, 2019 at 12:12:49AM +0200, Rafal Luzynski wrote:
> 1.10.2019 22:54 Keld Simonsen <keld@keldix.com> wrote:
> > [...]
> > I am also a native speaker of one of those languages, Danish,
> 
> A test:
> 
> $ LANG=da_DK.utf8 date
> tor  3 okt 00:00:05 CEST 2019
> $ LANG=ru_RU.utf8 date
> ???? ??????  3 00:00:23 CEST 2019
> $ LANG=pl_PL.utf8 date
> czw, 3 pa?? 2019, 00:00:31 CEST
> 
> Do I understand correctly that "tor" is correct here?  If yes,
> it is OK, I am not an expert at your language. :-)

For Danish, this is fine, for listings and logs etc.
The beginning of a sentence is normally capitalized in Danish, but this is not a sentence.
And having the day an month names capitalized leads confusion, you see a lot of occurrances
in just plain text, where these names  are capitalized - and people believe ths is correct, also because 
this is what is done in English.

Also I am associated with the official Danish standarsization organisation, where I need to state Danish info in accordance
with official conventions. and capitalizing the first letter because it would normally occur in the beginning
of a sentence is IMHO a hack.

using 3-letter abbreviatons is posix style. In danish I think 2-letter are more cmmon, but the 3-letters are wel understood, as you
in 5 cases just need to add 'dag' to get the full name of the day: man, ons, fre, lør, søn, for  month names 2 letters are not enough but
3 letters are fine in Danish.

I believe the abday and abmon specs are for use in posix utilities, so they should  be posix-style, eg. all same length so
file lisings with ls, and log entries format nicely.
For other uses of more cultural oriented we should add new keywords, like maybe abday_cult
> 
> I would say that Polish "czw" is not correct.  Indeed, normally
> we write weekday names (and month names) lowercase but as this is
> the beginning of a sentence the uppercase first letter would be
> better.  For the same reason I think that Russian "????" is correct
> even if CLDR says otherwise.


I would rather solve this with a formatter spec to capitalice the first letter
for example month names would nomally not be the first word in a sentence, an often the day-of-month would precede it.
capitalizing day names and not month names - against the rules of the language, is IMHO a mess.

> > and moreover I was the initial contributer of about 60 of the locales incl
> > ru_RU,
> > that Urich Drepper picked up for glibc. I am also the editor of ISO 14652
> > and ISO 30112 that provided extensions
> > beyond Posix i18n functionality, and I  provide guidance for their use.
> 
> I know and therefore I respect your opinion.
> 
> > My advice is that this bad policy to have wrongly
> > capitalized names here. 
> 
> I think we don't have a consensus here and therefore I will not push
> this commit unless someone convinces me to push it.
> 
> > [...]
> > > Back about the main problem, I would like to post a patch which would
> > > be the best explanation what I mean in this particular case.
> > 
> > What would it say? 
> 
> I think I posted it just while you were writing your message.
> I will appreciate if you take a look.  It does not say clearly whether
> upper/lowercase letters are correct, just that ru_UA should be a copy
> of ru_RU.

 I saw your advice and I agree. Just do the copy.

Keld