[Bug localedata/23140] More languages need two forms of month names

Keld Simonsen keld@keldix.com
Sat May 26 13:10:00 GMT 2018


On Sat, May 26, 2018 at 12:23:09PM +0000, digitalfreak at lingonborough dot com wrote:
> https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=23140
> (In reply to keld@keldix.com from comment #26)
> > [...]
> > IMHO as we are speaking about POSIX locales, so we should use POSIX style
> > names, that
> > is, oriented towards POSIX utilities use. CLDR is not oriented towards POSIX
> > use.
> 
> I don't remember where I read this but someone wrote that those POSIX rules
> apply to English language, not to other languages.  POSIX authors are not aware
> of every language in the world, therefore the rules are occasionally amended to
> support more languages.

Well,I have been around with POSIX locales for a long time, more than 25 years, and the
locales were always meant to be it support anything else than English.
So many other languages have these rules. POSIX authors at that time, including myself,
were quite aware of the requirements for many languages - but not for all.
This is still the case, POSIX i18n authors don't know everything in the world, but we are getting better.



> > [...]
> > And I am still uncertain that what glibc is doing now is following the POSIX
> > standard.
> > POSIX has recently (within the last couple of years) adressed the genitive
> > month names problem,
> > in a way compatible with BSD. I have not yet gotten around to verifying that
> > glibc is
> > following POSIX here.
> 
> If you mean the bug 10871 then in a part which refers to the full month names
> it strictly follows the rules of BSD, also follows the update which has been
> accepted by POSIX in 2010 but not yet published.  Therefore until it is
> published we call it "GNU extension" rather than "POSIX compatible".
> 
> Regarding the part which refers to the abbreviated month names the rules are
> similar but nobody except glibc so far implemented or proposed it.  POSIX has
> been asked to accept this as part of their standard but it may take another 10
> years.  For now we call it a genuine GNU extension. :-)

I agree that POSIX may be slow sometimes. As said, it is my plan to check up on this.

Best regards
keld



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