On Mon, 2005-02-14 at 18:14, Edward H. Trager wrote: > Hi, > > I posted the following on the [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list > which I suppose is the best place for it. But perhaps followers on this list > have some insight on these questions, so I thought I would ask here too: > > > I see that the recently-released glibc-2.3.4 has about 189 locales. > In comparision, CLDR 1.2 has I believe 231 locales in it. > > Can someone please clarify for me the following simple questions: > > 1) What is the current origin of the 189 locales in glibc-2.3.4? Are these > still the set of accrued locale data from glibc, or have these data already > been influenced/augmented by the CLDR/ICU locale data?
I believe the glibc locales are individual submissions from the respective countries. I think there is a bit of "reinvention of the wheel", as people have to show in some cases what is the official convention to represent data (like am_pm format, date format, etc). Per http://sources.redhat.com/ml/libc-locales/2005-q1/msg00002.html it looks that there is a bottleneck in the processing of bug reports and updates to the glibc registry. Petter Reinholdtsen has done a very good job to act as some sort of an intermediary between the glibc maintainers and the individuals that want to update their locale information. I feel there is a "conflict of interest" between the glibc maintainers and the GUI developers. The GUI developers want more freedom from glibc locale, so they maintain their own locale data for some fields (scary). For example, for "am_pm" (or 12-hour clock), the glibc maintainers prefer to set it if that is the official representation in the country. Else, this field should be empty. They also suggest to developers to check this field if it's empty, if it is, do not show the time in 12-hour format (as it would be technically incorrect). See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=140891&msg=47 In GNOME and the clock applet, you have the option to choose between 12-hour or 24-hour clock. So, for Greek, if you choose 12-hour clock, then 7pm shows as "7:00 " since am_pm is blank (it's a bit ironic, as officially in Greece we have the 12-hour clock). There was a recent discussion on gnome-i18n on this. See: 1. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2005-February/msg00015.html (it does not matter if at 12-hour clock the am_pm does not show up), 2. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2005-February/msg00139.html ("bypassing" locale data for usability purposes?). > 2) If the current glibc locale data have not yet been influenced/augmented > by the CLDR project, is there a plan to do so by the glibc maintainers? I would be really interested to learn about this answer. > 3) If there is a plan by the glibc maintainers to derive all future glibc > locale data > from the CLDR XML data repository, does this mean that we can look forward > to having > all of the localedata in UTF-8 format when it is translated into the POSIX > format > required by glibc? (This would be much nicer than the mish-mash of legacy > encodings). > > 4) Is there any future plan to extend the glibc library to, say, read > directly from the > CLDR LDML XML format? I would be really interested to see such a project taking place. A situation where glibc locale data are not considered that useful is a bad one, why not get rid off? Simos -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
