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Message-ID: <20140726193015.GQ4038@brightrain.aerifal.cx>
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 15:30:15 -0400
From: Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org>
To: musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Locale bikeshed time
On Sat, Jul 26, 2014 at 08:56:13PM +0200, u-igbb@...ey.se wrote:
> I apparently missed the discussions which led to this policy,
> sorry if I am beating a dead horse:
The original locale plan was based on the principle that the whole
locale system in C/POSIX is poorly designed, but that it's still the
basis for supporting native-language interfaces in software, and thus
that musl should eventually have the minimal locale support necessary
for enabling such usage. Using the locale system as a means for
arbitrary non-essential customization, support for legacy character
encodings, etc. is outside the scope of that.
> To prevent users from shooting themselves in the foot looks
> considerate. Personally I would nevertheless prefer to have a possibility
> to influence the radix dot character, at least as a locale variant
> and take the consequences.
>
> If anybody else feels for using "," than so be it in the corresponding
> locale, as the default or as a variant - how much would it cost?
>
> The generally "most international" locale I am aware of (eo_ZZ) happens
> to need ",". If your population numbers are correct, this seems to be
> a proper choice too - modulo broken locale use/deployment.
>
> Actually I very much dislike software which expects that it knows my
> situation better than myself and prevents me from doing what I need.
And what about character encoding? Should we also support Latin-1? Or
ISO-2022? One thing I don't like about how the whole locale discussion
has gone is that, once one one thing is added, demands for more and
more things that have much higher implementation and maintenance
costs, good technical reasons not to provide, and less and less
practical benefit, keep popping up. Radix points is definitely such an
item where the cost (in terms of bug/security risks, code size, making
state-free code stateful, maintenance, and just plain being ugly, ...)
is relatively high and the benefits are near-zero.
Rich
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