Is locale.alias really obsolete?

[Carlos O'Donell]

Community,

I'm CC'ing Jakub here for a historical perspective.

The file intl/locale.alias says:

# Note: This file is obsolete and is kept around for the time being for
# backward compatibility.  Nobody should rely on the names defined here.
# Locales should always be specified by their full name.

Is that really true?

It appears that we are using locale.alias as a way to support 
transitioning applications through a locale renaming process. This seems
like a valid and useful use of this file and the framework surrounding
the locale alias support.

The most recent example of this was the 2004 transition of no_NO to 
nb_NO. i.e. `no_NO.ISO-8859-1 nb_NO.ISO-8859-1'

Comments?

Cheers,
Carlos.