Some of you have noticed my commits of language/locale data, and I
wanted to outline my near-term plans and long-term hopes for that work.
First, it should be borne in mind that the whole situation is vastly
more complex than most of us are probably aware. Long ago, we adopted
IETF's locale naming convention for identifying languages, which was
defined in RFC 1766. This was obsoleted in favor of RFC 3066, which was
in turn obsoleted in favor of BCP 47, which currently identifies RFCs
4646 and 4647.
RFC 4646 defines the syntax and sources of locale subtags. For the
language subtag, tags are defined by (in order of preference): IANA, ISO
639-1, ISO 639-2/T, ISO 639-3, and ISO 639-5. Script subtags are defined
by ISO 15924, and region (e.g. country) subtags are defined by ISO 3166-1.
I committed a bit of Perl that will grab the latest versions of all of
this data from each registration authority (IANA, the Library of
Congress, SIL, Unicode, and ISO), and I've got another pair of files in
which I list the native names for many of the languages (copied from
Xiphos' database) and list those code actually used by Sword modules or
locales. I'm in the process of writing another script that will parse
through all of the files and output a big, easy to parse, master
database of locale data.
From that, we can generate up-to-date data for each front end in the
format that it needs and according to the desires of each team. So if
the BibleTime and Bible Desktop teams only want to ship locale data for
modules that are already shipped, we can filter everything else out. If
a team were to prefer the English names to native names, we could
produce that.
Longer term, it would be nice to push this functionality back into the
library so that front ends can all share the benefits of updated data
without having to deal with updates or the particulars and eventual
changes in BCP 47. But that will obviously require API changes, which
are not permitted, last I heard.
--Chris
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