Re: Talk about glibc locale format

[Denis Barbier <barbier at linuxfr dot org>]

On Mon, Jul 04, 2005 at 11:25:34PM +0200, Keld Jørn Simonsen wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 04, 2005 at 01:15:09AM +0200, Denis Barbier wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I will give a talk about glibc locale data format during Debian
> > conference
> >   http://www.debconf.org/debconf5/
> > next week (10-17th July) at Helsinki.
> > The aim of this talk is to give clues about data format so that
> > more people are interested in contributing to locale files.
> > Slides are available at
> >   http://people.debian.org/~barbier/talks/debconf5/glibc-locale.pdf
> > I am still polishing them, and will be glad to receive comments.
> 
> A few comments:

I am very glad to hear from you, my knowledge of ISO 14652 history is
of course weak.

> ISO 14652 was approved as a TR last year.

Ack, I will mention that.

> on page 11, you say that 14652 is not always backwards compatible with
> POSIX. Could you give examples? We did try hard to be backwards
> compatible.

This is emphasized when describing LC_TIME around slide 26; day and
abday are not backward compatible, which is really annoying.
You will answer that LC_IDENTIFICATION is meant to disambiguate
those situations, but I disagree, application developers (like cal
writers) should not have to worry about this field.
This "issue" is also mentioned in appendix D of this TR.

> On page 13, LC_VERSION is mentioned, and some talk about late drafts.
> Is that meant to be late drafts of 14652?
> If so I can assure you that there has not been anything about changing
> LC_IDENTIFICATION to LC_VERSION. If it is not 14652, then I would like
> to know what it is...

It looks like I was confused; LC_VERSION and LC_VERSIONS appear in
some drafts:
  http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg20/docs/14652fcd.txt
  http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg20/docs/n897-14652w25.pdf
but LC_IDENTIFICATION is what is found in the technical report.
I will remove all mentions of LC_VERSION* categories.

> A date of 2004 should mean adherance to ISO TR 14652:2004

I will add it.

> Page 26: 14652 is designed to be backwards compatible with POSIX.
> That is, if you just have a LC_TIME spec conformant to POSIX, 
> it will work the same way in 14652. But you can with 14652 set the 
> first day of the week (In the USA this is Sunday, in most of Europe
> this is Monday) and you can set different week numbering behaviours in
> 14652, which is not possible in POSIX.
> 
> Also the issue on the months, 14652 does allow you to specify that you
> have 13 months in a year.

Indeed, mon and abmon accept 13 month names, but how is the mapping
performed since the "week" keyword has no "month" counterpart?

> I think it is wrong to say that 14652 is not backwards compatible here.
> Whether it is controversial could be true, many misunderstandings can
> lead to heated discussions:-)
> 
> Page 32: Why is .* useles? 

> People may write "no" or "yes", and the answer will still be recognized.
> I know, you and I would never do that, but some newbies could.

Because in a regular expression,
  ^[nN].*
matches the exact same expression as ^[nN]

> Maybe you could mention LC_PAPER - which is probably the most useful of
> the new 14652 categories.

Yes, I was wondering about adding it.  My talk is already too long, so
I do not know if I will write a new slide, but I will certainly mention
it during the presentation.

> Else it is good to see such talks! And I would like if you get comments
> on it and probably missing features, if you could post such feedback to
> the list. 

Thanks for your support, do not hesitate to harass me if I forget to
send feedback ;)

Denis