[Bug localedata/23857] Esperanto has no country

["carmenbianca at fedoraproject dot org" <sourceware-bugzilla@sourceware.org>]

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=23857

--- Comment #8 from Carmen Bianca Bakker <carmenbianca at fedoraproject dot org> ---
(In reply to Rafal Luzynski from comment #7)
> Thank you.  I have not looked at the source code yet but my guess is that
> the list of territories comes from the list of locales with language part
> stripped.  This makes some sense to me: formats, units, etc. depend on the
> territory rather than language.  For example, English locale may have
> different units, currency, country name etc. for USA, UK, Australia, India,
> Ireland, and so on.  On the other hand, people living in one country
> probably use the same formats, units, and currency even if they speak
> different languages.  Therefore, if you want to select "Esperanto" as the
> locale for formats then... actually what would you expect?  Currency,
> country name, address format, car plate - "as used in (where?)"  Why
> "Netherlands" would not work better for you, for example?

The chief problem in selecting "Netherlands" is that LC_DATE won't have the
correct language.  I would much rather individually select each LC_* option,
but GNOME does not support that in its graphical interface.

> > https://bugs.python.org/issue35163 - Some weird obsolete configuration.
> 
> My first suggestion is that Python should not map ambiguous locales into
> detailed ones but not supported by the current operating system.
> 
> Would adding "eo.ISO8859-3" help to fix this issue?  I think the reason is
> that historically the locales without the encoding specified used 8-bit
> encoding like ISO 8859-1 or ISO 8859-3.  Therefore often the locales map to
> 8-bit encodings unless you specify "utf8" explicitly.  Later when Unicode
> became popular and widely used, newly added locales in glibc used UTF-8 as
> their only encoding.  This is the case of Esperanto: "eo" is an alias of
> "eo.UTF-8".  Somehow Python treats it as an alias of "eo_XX.ISO8859-3".
> 
> On the other hand I am not sure if adding the old encodings makes sense
> nowadays.  Old encodings are preserved only in order not to break existing
> systems.  Does any existing Linux system use "eo.ISO8859-3" and rely on it? 
> Is it likely to be true if this locale has never existed?

I don't think anything needs to be changed from glibc's end for this bug.  This
appears to be a Python-only oddity---I have never encountered eo.ISO8859-3
anywhere else.

> It is possible as a workaround but I still believe we are able to handle
> "eo" without a country name.  Even more: we (the glibc project) are able to
> handle it and as there are projects which do not (yet) handle it correctly I
> think we should rather approach them and tell them how to fix it.  So far I
> don't think we have found any project where the issue exists and cannot be
> fixed.

I don't disagree, but wouldn't changing this in glibc be a much easier solution
compared to the laborious process of opening bug reports everywhere to handle a
special case?

For instance, if we assume for a moment that "ia_FR" will become "ia", then a
lot of packages in a lot of distributions will need to change their for-loops
to `for eo ia *_*`.  This is cumulatively a lot of work for minority languages.
 A simple "ia_ZZ/eo_ZZ" would remove the special case and save a lot of work.

> Definitely no, Yiddish is not an artificial language and definitely is
> related with some territories where it is actually spoken.  It seems to me
> that Israel could make sense and I don't mind adding it if needed, probably
> also USA makes sense.  I don't think that calling Yiddish "worldwide" or
> "non-US" or "unknown" (in terms of territory) makes sense because we can
> tell the same about any random language.

I didn't imply that Yiddish is an artificial language.  I implied that having a
catch-all "yi_ZZ" would save a lot of work over creating individual locales for
all the countries in the world where Yiddish is spoken in some capacity, which
is a lot of countries.  In that capacity, Yiddish is an excellent comparison to
Esperanto, because both languages have a diaspora across the globe rather than
a defined nation state.

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