Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl wrote: > > You could help by pointing out for which locales you think > > Ha! Are you saying that you trust my opinion for all countries > except Sweden? :-) No, I don't trust you on anything like this. Your version of the truth for the situation in Sweden should give enough reason to not do so. :( But still, if you give a hint what locales you think are wrong, this could help investigating these things further by asking people who actually live in the country and know about what's used and what's not and why, and ask them if the current value is wrong. > In fact I think that in many countries the usage varies quite > a lot, partly randomly, partly depending on complicated factors. This is certainly true, some countries have a recommended standard, but one or more different ways of doing things used in practice. In these cases it is not at all entirely clear what the value should be, and one can argue for either way. Personally, I think that for locales to be useful, they have to represent the most common way of doing things in that country, since that behavior is what most users would expect. Nevertheless, if there are ways of doing things that are both common, then the behavior that most closely matches the recommended standard in the country is probably best. But in all these cases, the problem of selecting the proper behavior as a setting in the locale information is not trivial. However, that doesn't mean that refusing to use this information is the right thing to do (see below). > Too complicated to have a simple variable in a locale. Here I most certainly do not agree with you. You are forgetting that the above scenario does not apply to every country, in some countries there is an exact match of the recommended standard and what's actually used, and there is no problem at all. The only problem is if you choose not to honor the locale information and choose another hardcoded value by default that happen to be completely wrong in that country, both standards-wise and with respect to what's used. Also, in general this situation may also apply to countries where one or more behaviors are correct -- in these cases, either one of the values that are correct may not match your hardcoded default, while either one of the values used in the country (provided by glibc locale information) would have been a better and more correct choice. In general, I think that refusing to use locale information because the value *might* be wrong in some cases, and ignoring that the information most probably is correct in most cases (and thus certainly is better to use than a hard-coded default that by the very nature of hardcodedness is bound to be wrong in many more cases), is a very strange thing to do. Even if you do not agree that the information already is correct for most locales, you have to realize that locale information can get corrected and also *has* been corrected over time, providing a means for fixing the behavior of many applications at once. Recompiling util-linux for every single locale however, just to change the hardcoded default, isn't realistic at all. Christian
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