[Bug localedata/14641] Add a strftime()-like function for formatting human names

["bugdal at aerifal dot cx" <sourceware-bugzilla@sourceware.org>]

http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=14641

--- Comment #6 from Rich Felker <bugdal at aerifal dot cx> ---
On Wed, Nov 06, 2013 at 04:08:37PM +0000, simon.mcvittie at collabora dot co.uk
wrote:
> OK, so is your position that _NL_NAME_NAME_FMT should never be used, and if we
> need similar functionality, we should invent our own?

My opinion on this is not authoritative for glibc, but yes, my
position is that this locale property should be considered deprecated
and that new features using it should not be added. My reasoning is
that treating name formatting as a property of the user's locale is
fundamentally wrong. The way you format a person's name is a function
of _their_ cultural conventions, not your cultural conventions. Since
libc's locale system does not and cannot know the conventions
associated with the name being formatted, it cannot help you get the
correct results.

In some sense, _NL_NAME_NAME_FMT is less of an offense because it
might help programs know the right formatting (or a right default to
try) for new names introduced by the user. If a program takes the
format string and does its own formatting, it can also accept other
non-default formats. But if a program requests that the libc do the
formatting based on the current locale, there is no way to handle
non-default formats. In this sense, I would object less to a function
like strftime for names that took the name format string as an
explicit argument, rather than using the current locale's format
string. This is certainly an option that could be proposed and
discussed.

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