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Re: [PATCH] Fix decimal_point and thousands_sep in es_MX locale


On 6/6/2012 1:02 PM, Petr Baudis wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 06, 2012 at 12:48:28PM -0400, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
>> Petr,
>>
>> Several standards say that there should be a thin space between
>> the thousand separator, but the glibc locales have been using an
>> ASCII space <U0020> instead of the thin space <U2009>.
>>
>> Do you know of any reason for this?
> 
> My *guess* is the reason is mostly historical. It seems that before
> 2000, locale files did not use Unicode codepoints but markup like <SP>,
> which was then mechanically rewritten to <U0020> and noone bothered to
> change it further; new locale authors likely did not think much of it
> and/or copied data from existing locales using <U0020>.
> 
> I would certainly approve of updating this to thin space where
> appropriate. However, I think that
> 
>   (i) Some programs might get confused by this; the person doing the
> change should check at least behavior of common office programs after
> this change (not sure if there is any other common software using this
> data?), and possibly discuss this with their developers if there are
> problems.
> 
>   (ii) We should do the change en masse at least in most locales that
> are appropriate to change, so that any possible bugs in handling of
> Unicode characters in these fields are quickly noticed and fixed.
> 
> Hope that this does not sound as too much work; I could help with
> some of it, but do not have time to do the whole change by myself.
> 

This sounds like a great plan. We need leaders to step up and make
bold suggestions! :-)

For avoidance of doubt I would like to see:

(a) A new patch that uses <U0020> to fix es_MX. I'll review this again.

and

(b) A new BZ filed to fix all the locales using <U0020> to use
    thin space <U2009>. Set the target milestone to 2.17 please.

Aurelien, would you mind doing that?

Cheers,
Carlos.
-- 
Carlos O'Donell
Mentor Graphics / CodeSourcery
carlos_odonell@mentor.com
carlos@codesourcery.com
+1 (613) 963 1026


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