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[Bug localedata/14641] Add a strftime()-like function for formatting human names


http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=14641

--- Comment #4 from Rich Felker <bugdal at aerifal dot cx> ---
On Wed, Nov 06, 2013 at 12:52:02PM +0000, simon.mcvittie at collabora dot co.uk
wrote:
> The current motivation for this feature request is Folks, a library to
> aggregate contact/address-book information from various sources, much of it
> modelled on vCard syntax. If we know the formatted name (vCard's "FN") we do
> use it in preference to the structured name (vCard's "N", which might look like
> "N:Bach;Johann;Sebastian;Herr;"), but if all we know is the structured name, we
> need to display it somehow, and the user's locale seems a more reasonable guess
> than "they're probably American".

I can't see the justification for having a library's behavior depend
on the user's locale, especially when the library's purpose is this
kind of information processing. Name formatting logic really belongs
in your library, with the options either as a setting (possibly with
an ability to request a reasonable default based on the locale) or
based on heuristics using the rest of the contact's info (like
country).

BTW I think this is getting mildly off-topic for the bug tracker, but
the reason I posted it here is that I think it's a justification for
which this functionality does not belong in libc -- the idea that
using the user's locale rather than a locale associated with the
individual name is the wrong thing to be doing, and that in library
code working with this kind of data, it's the third-party library's
job to do this hard work of getting it right.

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