Re: Updating/adding locale for Ethiopia and Eritrea in GNU libc.

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere at hungry dot com>]

[Daniel Yacob]
> Traditionally there is no AM or PM.  A full sentence expression is
> used to specify the time, I've used an abbreviated form.  The word
> used for AM has 4 spellings, I thought I had the canonical form but
> did not.  Most people will confuse this.

Are you aware that you can skip the AM/PM value, and that this is
taken as an indication that the locale should use 24-hour time value?
At least I believe this is how it work.

> I dug up my a draft spec I have for the locales and looked into the
> sorting issue also.  This is a good reference if you don't have a
> copy:
> 
>   http://yacob.org/ISO-14652.pdf

Thanks.  I printed it.  Are you aware of
<URL:http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc22/wg20/>?

> I did get the multichar sequence to sort right for Oromo, also the
> Amharic problem is 95% fixed:
> 
>   http://yacob.org/am-et-update.tar.tgz

I tested this, and it seem to work.

> The only oddity is that english softs with "aAbBcC" but I think that
> is what is being set in file iso14651_t1 file.  I get the same order
> when I set LC_COLLATION=en_US.

OK.  Are you sure lower case should come before capital letters?  In
Norwegian it is the other way around.

> I'll play with the collation updates more on the weekend, set the
> symbols for punctuation and numbers, perhaps add one of the academic
> collation orders also.  I try to get new locales submitted for glibc
> by the end of next week.  Let me know if you have any comments.

Sounds good.  I did not understand why you added whitespace (<U0020>)
to the entries.  Are you sure this is a good idea?

And you should add charset information to the locale to match the
current version in glibc CVS.

--- am_ET.orig  Thu May  1 14:07:57 2003
+++ am_ET       Thu May  1 13:43:39 2003
@@ -2,6 +2,7 @@
 escape_char     /
 % Amharic language locale for Ethiopia.
 % Contributed by Daniel Yacob <yacob@geez.org>
+% Charset: UTF-8

 LC_IDENTIFICATION
 title      "Amharic language locale for Ethiopia"


Did you check the LC_NUMERIC and LC_MONETARY sections?  How are
numbers and currency values written in Amharic?  I do not think there
should be space at the end of int_curr_symbol.  At the very least, it
should use NO-BREAK SPACE (<U00A0>).

How are the following values written as numbers and currency (using
both $ and ETB) in Amharic?

  1
  -1
  1234.56
  -1234.56
  1234567.89
  -1234567.89
  12.3456789
  -12.3456789

In Norwegian, this would look like this:

  1
  kr 1,00
  NOK 1,00

  -1
  kr -1,00
  NOK -1,00

  1 234,56
  kr 1 234,56
  NOK 1 234,56

And so on...  Do you have a similar list for the languages you are
working on?  I want to add it to the test scripts in glibc.

(I think we should move this discussion to libc-alpha, to get input
from the glibc maintainers.  I copy this reply there.)