Re: How to "copy" with overrides in a locale file?

[Keld Jørn Simonsen <keld at dkuug dot dk>]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2003 at 08:23:13PM +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> [Ulrich Drepper]
> > Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> > > But this do not seem to be possible.  Why?
> > 
> > The locale definitions as they exist today have a chance of being
> > portable.  With non-standard copy usage this isn't the case anymore.
> 
> OK, so this is a limitation of the standard.  The question remains why
> this limitation is in the standard.  I guess Keld is the man for such
> considerations. :)

there are several issues her:

One is can you override just some keywords in a spec by 
copying the category and then just list the changed keywords?
POSIX formids this for most categories. 14652 allows it in a few
categories, but follows POSIX in most categories, including LC_TIME.
We may change this in future editions of 14652 if that is deemed a good
idea. And I may think it is a good idea, as it clearly identifies 
what changes there are.  Opinions welcome.

The second issue is whether one should copy from non-standard locales,
that is, other locales than say "POSIX", the "i18n" locale and possibly
the "en_DK" locale. 
Ulrich says that this may not be good practice. Some locales may be
excluded from a distribution, and thus not available for copying.
I know myself that we are trying to make Danish Linux distributions
that can fit on one CD, and to do that we would probably remove all
l10n that is not Danish, including most locales.

On the other hand the cases where you want to copy is mostly from 
other locales pertaining to your country, such as the Spanish or
Norwegian case. What is good practice here is up to the glibc
maintainers, they are in a better position than me to say what is an
overall good strategy here.

best regards
keld