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


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. 

best regards
Keld


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