Re: Is it OK to write ASCII strings directly into locale source files?

[Carlos O'Donell <carlos@redhat.com>]

On 07/24/2017 05:13 PM, Florian Weimer wrote:
>> My only technical objection with writing straight UTF-8 is that it could
>> lead to more mistakes, and Mike just found one in CLDR where an Arabic
>> Farsi character was used incorrectly because it displayed the same glyph.
>> It was caught when harmonizing with glibc where you have to write out the
>> code points (Mike filed a bug upstream with CLDR).
> 
> Wasn't it caught by locale testing which revealed that the locale
> wasn't compatible with ISO-8859-6?  That sanity check would still
> apply to locale definitions written in UTF-8.

My point was that the mistake was made in CLDR upstream where I only
presume the mistake was made because the glyphs are identical.

If we had not been using ISO-8859-6, or if we'd had a mapping from
all the UTF-8 chars into ISO-8859-6 (there was no transliteration for the
Farsi character), then we would not have noticed the error in the 
original source locale.

My only argument is that when you are forced to use <Uxxx> encoding it
is empirically less likely you'll make a mistake. Like reading a sentence
backwards to catch errors since it prevents your brain from filling in
the missing information.

> I would still prefer the <U…> encoding for control characters which
> are in the portable character set.  So I have to object to the
> “maximum” part. :)

Yes, I had ignored the control characters, so I agree, not maximally :}

-- 
Cheers,
Carlos.