On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 09:55:01AM +0000, Creamy wrote: > Are you suggesting to add individual locales as and when a significant > number of translations exist in ports, (good idea), or to select a > few South-American dialects to represent the whole continent, (very > bad idea)?
A mix of the two. I don't want to make technical decisions based on politics. I'd like to recognize and fix situations where people are missing functionality from the system because their language of choice is not represented properly. It's not a black and white decision, it's a trade-off. Also, I think that extending the locale implementation (such as adding support for LC_TIME, LC_COLLATE, etc) is much more important at this stage than adding additional files to /usr/share/locale. > There is often more difference between South-American dialects of > Spanish than between any one of them and Castillian Spanish. How would > you decide which country is going to represent the whole of the continent? That's a tough question, and I really don't mean to alienate people who speak any of these dialects. But I'd like to avoid the situation where typing the name of a locale is something that people associate with their own identity. Because then, there would be no reason at all to stop adding more locales until the /usr filesystem is full. Systems like Debian ask their users to generate some selection of locales during the installation process. I don't think it is a good idea to ask users to make that kind of choice during system installation. But it's a consequence of the fact that Debian has too many locales. > > No offence, but to me, the name of a locale is just... a name. > > Let's try to make useful functional changes to the system. > > Adding locales for purely patriotic reasons seems like a waste of time > > to me. > > I agree, especially as there will always be awkward individuals like me > who live in one country, but speak mostly foreign languages, and use > date formats and keyboard layouts which don't correspond to any standard > locale either for the country they reside in, or the foreign languages > they speak. Exactly. I'm a native speaker of German, but learned a significant amount of English in Ireland during my teenage years forcing me to slowly recover some chunks of my memory of German when I got back. All my computers speak English to me and I speak English to them, whether or not people around me speak German to me. I type on a US keyboard (cannot type on German ones for the life of me), and prefer to read dates with days given before months because that is what I'm used to. My preferred personal locale would probably be called something like en_IE_de_DE_kbd_US.UTF-8. > It only makes sense to add them if there is a real intention to use > them. Why not just add individual locales as and when a significant number > of translations exist in ports, as it gives people an incentive to translate > in to their local language. I'd like to avoid making up a set of rules about when new locales can be added. I think we should discuss this on a case-by-case basis, and allow people who are genuinely missing functionality to make their case.
