From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 22467 invoked by alias); 7 Nov 2013 15:27:45 -0000 Mailing-List: contact libc-locales-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: libc-locales-owner@sourceware.org Received: (qmail 22767 invoked by uid 55); 7 Nov 2013 15:00:41 -0000 From: "bugdal at aerifal dot cx" To: libc-locales@sourceware.org Subject: [Bug localedata/14641] Add a strftime()-like function for formatting human names Date: Thu, 07 Nov 2013 15:27:00 -0000 X-Bugzilla-Reason: CC X-Bugzilla-Type: changed X-Bugzilla-Watch-Reason: None X-Bugzilla-Product: glibc X-Bugzilla-Component: localedata X-Bugzilla-Version: unspecified X-Bugzilla-Keywords: X-Bugzilla-Severity: enhancement X-Bugzilla-Who: bugdal at aerifal dot cx X-Bugzilla-Status: NEW X-Bugzilla-Priority: P2 X-Bugzilla-Assigned-To: unassigned at sourceware dot org X-Bugzilla-Target-Milestone: --- X-Bugzilla-Flags: X-Bugzilla-Changed-Fields: Message-ID: In-Reply-To: References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Bugzilla-URL: http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/ Auto-Submitted: auto-generated MIME-Version: 1.0 X-SW-Source: 2013-q4/txt/msg00066.txt.bz2 http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=14641 --- Comment #11 from Rich Felker --- On Thu, Nov 07, 2013 at 12:29:55PM +0000, keld at keldix dot com wrote: > If there are different users then it is only natural to switch to each user's > locale, eg when printing a name, or printing an address. No. Locale names (and whether they even exist) are implementation-defined. A correct application cannot use locales by name, but can only use the user's configured locale or the C/POSIX locale. Applications which assume the existence of particular locale names are not portable, and even if you only cared about them working on GNU/Linux systems, many such desktop systems only have one locale installed (the user's own locale). Even if you could assume the names and existence of locales, their definitions may vary slightly between systems, which means the interpretation of your data would not be portable. The key here is that name "formatting" is not just presentation, it's actually interpretation. > I believe this is in scope of libc, meaning that this is to make an application > culturally adaptable. It is just a more advanced use than the normal i18n, > because we want to accomodate different users' cultural conventions. No, the cultural conventions in question are not cultural conventions of any users of the system. The data you're working with has been encoded (I would go so far as to say "corrupted") in a way that's dependent on the cultural conventions of the person whom it names (or sometimes not even that, but the cultural conventions imposed on that person by virtue of where they're living and their legal status there). The problem is decoding it to the person's actual name. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are on the CC list for the bug.