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[Bug localedata/14641] Deprecate name_fmt
- From: "bugdal at aerifal dot cx" <sourceware-bugzilla at sourceware dot org>
- To: glibc-bugs at sourceware dot org
- Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2014 17:08:15 +0000
- Subject: [Bug localedata/14641] Deprecate name_fmt
- Auto-submitted: auto-generated
- References: <bug-14641-131 at http dot sourceware dot org/bugzilla/>
https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=14641
--- Comment #17 from Rich Felker <bugdal at aerifal dot cx> ---
There are two different arguments for deprecation of name_fmt that can be made
based on comments in this pr:
1. Imposing a structure of first name, middle name, last name, etc. on names is
itself a cultural convention that's far from universal. Providing a
culture-specific way to format these poorly-thought-out name components into a
combined string does not solve the problem of making a program compatible with
diverse cultural conventions since such storage is already wrongly imposing
particular conventions.
2. Locales should deal with the cultural conventions of the user's cultural
environment, not the conventions associated with a particular piece of data.
Of these, #1 only applies directly to name_fmt. If similar arguments apply to
other items, that may be a good argument for their deprecation, but that would
be a separate discussion. Argument #2 on the other hand applies to a much
broader class of items, but I think it's also less clear-cut that it's correct.
With the existence of uselocale/locale_t and de-facto conventions for locale
names, one could argue that it's reasonable to use the locale system for
dealing with data records where each record has associated with it a cultural
context in which it's to be interpreted. I think this is probably a bad design
(for example, many systems omit installation of all locales except the user's,
which would affect what data they can process, and having a full locale
installation is a lot more costly than just having external data on
country-code-specific telephone number formatting, etc.) but I can see where
some people would prefer it.
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