Re: Swedish calendar localization in official release (sv-kalender.el)?

[Stefan Kangas]

Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

> Just a question/suggestion: can we get a localized calendar for swedish
> language into official release? There is a small file by Daniel Jensen,
> found at: http://bigwalter.net/daniel/elisp/.
>
> I did a small hack to it, just added names for abbreviated day names and
> header array since it seems to not be properly initialized if
> sv-kalender is loaded after the calender.el.
>
> In a short mail correspondence with Daniel, he says he has signed FSF
> copyrights, so I guess, legaly it shouldn't be a problem to include that
> file amongst few other localizations in lisp/calender?

I support this proposal.  If there are no legal issues, for me it's a
no-brainer that this file (and some similar ones) should be included
in Emacs itself.  I don't know if others agree, but I have myself been
wondering why sv-kalender.el is not just part of Emacs.  If you are
living in Sweden, the calendar is next to useless for many kinds of
planning if you don't have that library loaded.

The only drawback I see is that sometimes people stop maintaining
things once they are merged into Emacs.  I'm not sure what could be
done about that, or if others here even share that concern.  Perhaps
we could set it up as a GNU ELPA core package?  Or perhaps I'm worried
for no reason.

In any case, we should specifically ask the current maintainer to
continue maintaining it inside of Emacs, and make it clear that we
have no extra resources or volunteers on our end that can really help
with that.  Our motivation should be made clear: it is simply to
distribute this useful library to more users.

> Maybe the
> name of the file itself should be adjusted, like calender-swedish.el or
> something?

(I don't know which conventions could be useful here, but note that
Swedish is also spoken in Finland.)

> Also a side question about localizations as found on Emacs Wiki:
>
> https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CalendarLocalization
>
> I can't imagine that day and month names and few other bits related to
> that information can be copyrighted. Would ot be interesting to
> collect info from that wiki page into some file with localized names
> and maybe have Emacs auto load localized names when avialable based on
> value in LANG env (or whatever variable is suitable), and a variable to
> turn on/off that behaviour?

>From my perspective, the most useful part here is the code to
calculate when the national holidays are, as the rules for that can be
quite finicky.  (See sv-kalender.el for example.)

Including lists of month names and so on in various languages could
also be useful, but we should make sure to do it in a clean way.

Even just including sv-kalender.el (renamed to something suitable) so
that a person living in Sweden can just (require 'sv-kalender) and be
done with it is a useful step forward, I think.

Thanks for looking into this.  I hope we can see some results for Emacs 28.