Re: [PATCH] Fix decimal_point and thousands_sep in es_MX locale

[Carlos O'Donell <carlos_odonell at mentor dot com>]

On 6/6/2012 5:53 PM, Keld Simonsen wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 06, 2012 at 01:14:25PM -0400, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
>> On 6/6/2012 1:02 PM, Petr Baudis wrote:
>>> On Wed, Jun 06, 2012 at 12:48:28PM -0400, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
>>>> Petr,
>>>>
>>>> Several standards say that there should be a thin space between
>>>> the thousand separator, but the glibc locales have been using an
>>>> ASCII space <U0020> instead of the thin space <U2009>.
>>>>
>>>> Do you know of any reason for this?
>>>
>>> My *guess* is the reason is mostly historical. It seems that before
>>> 2000, locale files did not use Unicode codepoints but markup like <SP>,
>>> which was then mechanically rewritten to <U0020> and noone bothered to
>>> change it further; new locale authors likely did not think much of it
>>> and/or copied data from existing locales using <U0020>.
>>>
>>> I would certainly approve of updating this to thin space where
>>> appropriate. However, I think that
>>>
>>>   (i) Some programs might get confused by this; the person doing the
>>> change should check at least behavior of common office programs after
>>> this change (not sure if there is any other common software using this
>>> data?), and possibly discuss this with their developers if there are
>>> problems.
>>>
>>>   (ii) We should do the change en masse at least in most locales that
>>> are appropriate to change, so that any possible bugs in handling of
>>> Unicode characters in these fields are quickly noticed and fixed.
>>>
>>> Hope that this does not sound as too much work; I could help with
>>> some of it, but do not have time to do the whole change by myself.
>>>
>>
>> This sounds like a great plan. We need leaders to step up and make
>> bold suggestions! :-)
>>
>> For avoidance of doubt I would like to see:
>>
>> (a) A new patch that uses <U0020> to fix es_MX. I'll review this again.
>>
>> and
>>
>> (b) A new BZ filed to fix all the locales using <U0020> to use
>>     thin space <U2009>. Set the target milestone to 2.17 please.
> 
> Well, I think this is not the best way forward.
> It is only some countries that prescribes thin space as the thousands separator.
> This should be documented in each case.
> 
> Also the use of Unicode only characters break the universallity of locales,
> as they cannot be used with 8-bit character sets.
> And it may break programs that tries to parse numbers. 

Keld,

Your make some very good points, but it doesn't preclude filling a bug.

Just because a bug exists doesn't mean it will be fixed, and it doesn't
mean it will be fixed in the suggested way. The bug represents a starting
point for a discussion.

Please make sure that you make these comments in the bug so that we don't 
loose them.

Does that make sense?

Cheers,
Carlos.
-- 
Carlos O'Donell
Mentor Graphics / CodeSourcery
carlos_odonell@mentor.com
carlos@codesourcery.com
+1 (613) 963 1026