Re: [PATCH] ja_JP locale: Fix the offset in era-string for Taisho gan-nen [BZ #24162]

[Rafal Luzynski <digitalfreak at lingonborough dot com>]

21.02.2019 03:11 Carlos O'Donell <carlos@redhat.com> wrote:
> On 2/20/19 5:29 PM, Rafal Luzynski wrote:
> > [...]
> > If I understand correctly, a new Japanese era began on 1912-07-30 and
> > from that day til the end of the year the year number should be 1.
> > Currently that year number is 2 in glibc which is incorrect.  Also whole
> > year 1913 has the same number 2 in glibc which is correct.  This already
> > breaks sorting.  I think that backporting this may only help and will
> > not break anything.
> > 
> > Do you sustain your objection against backporting?  If not, do you have
> > any suggestion how many stable versions should be fixed?
> 
> My objection is not sustained. I only wanted to point out that in a stable
> release customers expect sortings to be stable and correctness is not
> always
> an important factor. This is what I have seen in my experience working on
> RHEL as an enterprise distribution. A bug is something you can document,
> but
> once a list order changes it can have a chain of consequences that are
> harder
> to fix. So for enterprise: change is the enemy.
> 
> This is upstream glibc, and so we can argue that the value of the fix is
> higher
> than the value of a stable sorting. So I can support backporting the fix
> to
> a stable branch if required, but unless someone is asking for it, I would
> not
> backport it.

OK, I understand this and I will not insist on backporting to multiple
stable branches.  However, I would like to suggest backporting to 2.29
because:

* it has been released only recently and hopefully has not yet reached many
  production systems,
* if any sorting using the Japanese calendar exists it is broken because
  of this bug already,
* sorting dates by strftime() to Japanese calendar does not look to me
  as a good idea at all.

TAMUKI-san, while we are discussing here backporting we agree that you
can push this patch to master already, optionally applying suggestions
from my review.  Also, your opinion whether to backport or not will be
valuable here.

Regards,

Rafal