Re: GNU glibc and the CLDR locales questions

[barbier at linuxfr dot org (Denis Barbier)]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2005 at 09:42:46AM -0500, Ed Trager wrote:
> Hello, everyone,
> 
> Can someone please answer the following regarding the latest glibc-2.3.4:

I am not involved in glibc, but here are some points.

> 1) What is the current origin of the 189 locales in glibc-2.3.4? Are these
>    still the set of accrued locale data from glibc, or have these data already
>    been influenced/augmented by the CLDR/ICU locale data?
>    (I suspect that the answer to this question is that the data are the accrued 
>     locale data from glibc, not yet influenced by CLDR.  Is this correct?)

Yes.

> 2) If the current glibc locale data have not yet been influenced/augmented
>    by the CLDR project, is there a plan to do so by the glibc maintainers?
>    I would really like to know what the maintainer's thoughts and future plans
>    might be.
> 
> 3) If there is a plan by the glibc maintainers to derive all future
> glibc locale data
>    from the CLDR XML data repository, does this mean that we can look
> forward to having
>    all of the localedata in UTF-8 format when it is translated into
> the POSIX format
>    required by glibc? 
>    (This would be much nicer than the mish-mash of legacy encodings).

This does not make sense, files under localedata are ASCII encoded
with a specific notation to handle ISO10646 characters.

> 4) Is there any future plan to extend the glibc library to, say, read
> directly from the
>    CLDR LDML XML format?

For efficiency reasons, glibc functions read compiled locale data, so
what you want is a standalone program similar to localedef to compile
CLDR files into glibc compiled format.

Denis