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Re: Variable length date strings in glibc locales?
- From: "Carlos O'Donell" <carlos at redhat dot com>
- To: Keld Simonsen <keld at keldix dot com>, Marko Myllynen <myllynen at redhat dot com>
- Cc: libc-locales at sourceware dot org, "mtk.manpages" <mtk dot manpages at gmail dot com>
- Date: Tue, 27 May 2014 17:20:44 -0400
- Subject: Re: Variable length date strings in glibc locales?
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
- References: <538437B0 dot 50808 at redhat dot com> <20140527210241 dot GA8261 at www5 dot open-std dot org>
On 05/27/2014 05:02 PM, Keld Simonsen wrote:
> On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 09:58:56AM +0300, Marko Myllynen wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> in some languages dates are written without leading zeroes so that May 3
>> would be "3.5.". The same for time, 08:07:00 would be "8.07.00".
>>
>> In glibc locales it would be possible to write dates and times in such
>> fashion but do we know how that would affect existing applications? Are
>> they expecting dates and times to be fixed length and would variable
>> length date strings cause formatting or layout issues? Looking at
>> existing locales, almost all of them use fixed length strings for
>> d_fmt/t_fmt/date_fmt/d_t_fmt.
>>
>> Ideally of course it would be nice to change certain locales to use date
>> and time formats according to their cultural conventions and national
>> recommendations but if that would lead to wonky layout in applications
>> then it's probably better to be pragmatic and use fixed length dates.
>>
>> I could add few words about this to our Locales wiki page if someone
>> happens to know what's the best approach here.
>
> I think there are two consideraation schools.
>
> 1. What is expected by users using POSIX like systems.
>
> 2. What is expected by the linguistic oriented users.
>
> This varies from program to program.
Certainly.
So I'm going to take a policy position for glibc. The GNU C
Library should accept locales with dates and times of variable
widths.
If the author of a program wishes a constant width they need
to use an ISO standard date format, or pad the individual
components themselves.
Cheers,
Carlos.