Re: [PATCH] Use Unicode code points for country_isbn

[Keld Simonsen <keld@keldix.com>]

On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 09:50:46AM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Keld Simonsen wrote:
> >it should be easier to create locales.
> >One could do that with a GUI that helped create and proofread and test 
> >locales.
> 
> I'm not aware of any such GUI, and even if one existed people would have to 
> be trained to use it.  In contrast, we already have GUIs (e.g., Emacs) that 
> people already know how to use and that work reasonably well with UTF-8 
> localedef sources.
> 
> Although the other goals you mention are laudable ones, surely they could 
> be achieved by an automatic transformation of UTF-8 localedef sources into 
> a less-readable equivalent with angle brackets, an equivalent that could be 
> processed even by hypothetical tools operating in legacy multibyte locales. 
> This shouldn't require a fancy GUI; it should be a relatively simple batch 
> program.  Any engineering effort in this area would likely need this kind 
> of transformation anyway, and any software developers in this specialized 
> area should be able to take on this relatively minor extra task.

We could have a utility to do that, and probably there was one developed 
when Ulrich converted the mnemonic style to UCS codepoints. But maybe
that is lost. Or it could be part of the localedef utility,
given that localedef understands the full syntax of locales, then a conversion
option to and from different charsets and symbolic representations could be
done, with some better chances of being maintained and updated for
new features, and not lost.

I was also thinking of testing, how would a date be output with this date format?
I think there may be someting like that lying around, eg for KDE localization,
which I think is based on some other data and formats than glibc locales,
but it is a much bigger work than just doing some conversion of characters.

Keld