Re: [PATCH] perform sanity check in po.m4

[Robert Millan]

Excuse me for the delay.  I've been trying to find a solution but couldn't come 
up
with any.  Sorry!


On Tue, Oct 10, 2006 at 02:09:08PM +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Robert Millan wrote:
> > Please consider this sanity check for po.m4.  This should help to prevent
> > developers from mistakenly adding broken locales (e.g. "klingon" instead of
> > "tlh").
> 
> It is an interesting idea, to try to avoid misnamed PO files. But it is
> unimplementable:
>   1) PO files are named after the glibc locale. But the only formal naming
>      rule for glibc locales is this:
>          address@hidden
>      without further restrictions on the four components.
>   2) The RFC 4646, which specifies a different syntax
>          language[-script][-territory]...
>      explicitly allows 7-letter language names (see RFC 4646, section 
> 2.2.1.5).
> Thus there are no rules which would one hand be able to recognise "klingon"
> as being invalid, and on the other hand be open to future developments.
> 
> Similarly for the territory name. Some locale names in use in glibc, such as
> sr_CS, are actually invalid, but you cannot tell from a purely syntactic point
> of view.
> 
> Btw, there is probably a flaw in your patch: range expressions [a-Z] will do 
> the
> wrong thing in many locales. Also, the codeset often contains digits.
> 
> So, what can we do to avoid misnamed PO files? I think it's a documentation
> issue. The gettext doc lists all language 2-letter language codes in an
> appendix. Do you think it would be useful to list also the 3-letter codes
> for small languages?
> 
> Bruno
> 

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Robert Millan

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