Re: short day translations vs cldr entries

[keld at keldix dot com]

On Tue, Feb 09, 2016 at 02:53:02AM -0500, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> should glibc localedata conform entirely to what is in cldr ?
> some examples of why i ask this:
> 
> German languages in glibc use:
>   Son;Mon;Die;Mit;Don;Fre;Sam
> but the CLDR uses:
>   So;Mo;Di;Mi;Do;Fr;Sa
> 
> Spanish languages in glibc use:
>   dom;lun;mar;mié;jue;vie;sáb
> but the CLDR uses:
>   dom.;lun.;mar.;mié.;jue.;vie.;sáb.
> this can be seen in a bunch of languages too like French
> 
> these aren't just in the day/format/abbreviated section where
> having a trailing period makes sense -- the day/stand-alone/
> abbreviated translations also have a trailing period.
> 
> attached is my full update for days/months to cldr.  i've compressed
> it to avoid the spam filter on the mailing lists from rejecting it.
> -mike

I was the one who originally wrote the locales, partly as part of a CEN
exercise - the European Standards Institute.

The design principles were that these were specs for posix locales, 
to replace the POSIX/C locale, and for use with POSIX  utilities 
like ls, and logging etc.  As the POSIX locale used 3 letters for the
month and day names, the other language specs were also 3 letters for
these abbreviations. If you wanted 2 letter names eg for sy names, you could
just write the first 2 letters of the string. This even goes for English
Su,Mo,Tu,We,Th,Fr,Sa.

Then entered the language experts, and they asked for dots for abbreviations
and unequal langth of the abbreviations, which made logs look strange.

And CLDR is not made for POSIX, on the contrary CLDR was made to take over
the posix work, killing ISO 14652 and the ISO equivalent of CLDR - ISO 15897
in the process. They more or less succeeded.

So that is my 2 cents for design: keep the POSIX style abbreviations.
That is what the abbreviations were designed for, and that is
probablly where they are used even today.

Best regards
Keld