We did that deliberately. Faced with a situation where a registration authority changes IDs on a whim -- with no regard to the issues of stability in software and data -- the best policy is to always use the old one, and map any new locales to the old one. That way when you exchange IDs between old and new systems, it all continues to work. (We did in fact know of the latest version of the standard at the time.)
(In ICU, we did add a more general-purpose aliasing mechanism, both for resource bundles and parts thereof.) Mark __________________________________ http://www.macchiato.com ► “Eppur si muove” ◄ ----- Original Message ----- From: "Philippe Verdy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Doug Ewell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, July 12, 2003 00:27 Subject: Re: ISO 639 "duplicate" codes (was: Re: Ligatures in Turkish and Azeri, was: Accented ij ligatures) > On Saturday, July 12, 2003 6:51 AM, Doug Ewell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Philippe Verdy <verdy_p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote: > > > > > Good luck with ISO language codes which does not even > > > define them, and contain many duplicate codes even in > > > the Alpha-2 space (he/iw, in/id), or unprecize codes > > > matching sometimes very imprecize families of languages > > > overlapping other language codes... > > > > The codes "iw" for Hebrew and "in" for Indonesian were deprecated > > FOURTEEN YEARS AGO. It is not accurate or fair to refer to them as > > "duplicates" of "he" and "id". The Registration Authority deprecates > > such codes, rather than deleting them, for backward compatibility with > > any data that might contain the old codes. > > I was sure also that "iw" was not used today, until I found that it is > still used in Java on Windows, for legacy reasons... Creating a resource > bundle in Hebrew with the code "he" was simply... ignored. So I had to > rename it to "iw". > > Shamely, on Linux or various Unixes the correct code to use for locales > varies, and it comes from the user-environment settings, actually setup > by a system profile, most of the time... Users that want to get the > benefit of existing locales for Hebrew will constantly need to change > between "he" and 'iw". The "normal" installation solution is still today > to create a file link between "he" and "iw" resources, so that they both > can be used. > > I was really disappointed when I saw that these legacy language codes > were not simplifiable the way we think, by ignoring "iw" and "in", and still > today, Java does not offer a way to create "links" at runtime to resolve > locales with equivalent ids, without duplicating resources or creating > special rules with: if ( code="he"|| code="iw" ) > (don't forget that Java has also run-time resources with no files)... > > >
