musl - locale fallback option

Follow @Openwall on Twitter for new release announcements and other news

[<prev] [next>] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 23:46:31 +0200
From: Wermut <wermut@...il.com>
To: "musl@...ts.openwall.com" <musl@...ts.openwall.com>
Subject: locale fallback option

Hi

I just read, that you committed the basic locale code and about the
musl firsts and thought of one thing that I would really like to see
in a modern implementation.

Problem: User A speaks a language "xyz" and lives in country "AB". So
he will set the relevant locale environment vars to "xyz_AB". The
problem is, that the language "xyz" is only spoken by a minority of
people and the translation of the software in his language is often
not complete or non existend. The result is, that user A will have to
read the most strings in plain english, because this is the standard
fallback. Because our user A is a member of a minority, he knows also
the language "ts" which is also spoken in "AB", but he does not know
any english.

Status quo: Because the translation "xyz_AB" is not really complete,
the user A gives up, is frustrated and sets his locale to "ts_AB".

What really should be possible: User A sets the locale "xyz_AB" and
sets "ts_AB" as a fallback for definitions and strings not available
in "xyz_AB". Only if a string is not defined in either "xyz_AB" or
"ts_AB", the hardcoded english string is shown to him.

This would require, that the locale definition would accept something
like LANG=xyz_AB:ts_AB

I have worked in the past with some of these translation problems and
worked with people from a lot of minorities that have all the same
problem: The locale subsystem is just no flexible enough. I know that
the implementation is potentially expensive, because you could end up
in looking into a lot of physical files on your hard drive, but it
would definitive be a big improvement and would help that almost
distinguished language would be used more often in computer
translations.

Thanks for reading.

Regards

Kevin

Confused about mailing lists and their use? Read about mailing lists on Wikipedia and check out these guidelines on proper formatting of your messages.