From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 24367 invoked by alias); 15 Apr 2007 22:34:42 -0000 Received: (qmail 24336 invoked by uid 48); 15 Apr 2007 22:34:31 -0000 Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 22:34:00 -0000 Message-ID: <20070415223431.24335.qmail@sourceware.org> From: "acolomb at schickhardt dot org" To: glibc-bugs@sources.redhat.com In-Reply-To: <20050227185500.773.julian@mehnle.net> References: <20050227185500.773.julian@mehnle.net> Reply-To: sourceware-bugzilla@sourceware.org Subject: [Bug localedata/773] de_DE locale should use ISO date format according to national standards X-Bugzilla-Reason: CC Mailing-List: contact glibc-bugs-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: glibc-bugs-owner@sourceware.org X-SW-Source: 2007-04/txt/msg00061.txt.bz2 ------- Additional Comments From acolomb at schickhardt dot org 2007-04-15 23:34 ------- I agree with Julian on this. "colloquial" as defined by www.thefreedictionary.com refers to something --SNIP-- 1. Characteristic of or appropriate to the spoken language or to writing that seeks the effect of speech; informal. 2. Relating to conversation; conversational. --SNIP-- Ulrich is right, nobody uses the new standard format in conversation. But that is not what standards are made for. Informal speech or text can still use the descriptive format like "16. April 2007", which is exactly how the date is pronounced in German speech (where 16. is spoken as the ordinal number "sechzehnter"). I think any standard you can find out there does not try to regulate people's everyday life, but formal communication among them. Computers (and especially applications where date representation is important) are typically used in formal (legal and business) environments. So this is exactly the area the standards were designed for. Especially this standard tries to ensure comformance among several countries in a globally communicating world, so that everyone knows how to read what someone else meant to say. In my opinion, the locale definitions in a computer operating system should reflect these standards that people should have learned in school instead of what they use (wrongfully) when jotting notes in their calendar. For the new format itself, it is also more logical (most significant number first as in the underlying arabic number system), but this argument is probably not in the scope of this bug. It has already been decided by an international institution. The fact that not many people are using the new standard format (after ten years) should not be a reason not to implement it. Any German native-speaker is probably aware of the confusion about the new spelling rules in Germany. After several revisions, I estimate that less people in Germany know the German spelling rules than those who know how to write the date correctly. Now, was that a reason for any software project not to accept the new rules and issue different word lists for new and old (where nobody knows what "old" currently means) German spelling? About Ulrich's statement that the ISO 8601 format is available through other means: I am aware that some people use the en_DK locale for the time and date locale setting to get ISO 8601 compliance (btw. what do the English language and Denmark have to do with German date formats?). I have not yet found a consistent way to even set my locale preferences from my user profile when accessing different hosts on which I do not have administrator access to change the system-wide default configuration. If you have any idea about that, please tell me (I am not using any desktop environment like KDE, GNOME). To see whether people are frustrated by their dates appearing differently, I would suggest distributing a second locale with the correct date formats. Btw: Wasn't that also a " just another act of bureaucracy that institution is so notorious for. " (from debian-l10n-german mailing list)? Yet another issue that was not gladly accepted by the public but instantly got focus from software maintainers--because it was the new standard. Please reconsider your decision about this change. I hope this post will not start a flame war, and I apologize if some of my arguments are a little sarcastic. Just wanted to make my point clear. Will we have to wait for the Microsoft Corporation to be the first to implement such a little change with such a big impact, again? :-) Kind regards, Andre -- http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=773 ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug, or are watching someone who is.