Re: Serbian (sr) language translation team: maintainer unresponsive

[Keld Jørn Simonsen <keld dkuug dk>]

On Tue, Apr 08, 2003 at 06:42:47PM +0200, Danilo Segan wrote:
> Charles Voelger wrote:
> 
> >On Lun, 2003-04-07 at 17:11, Christian Rose wrote:
> > 
> >
> >>mån 2003-04-07 klockan 23.02 skrev Charles Voelger:
> >>   
> >>
> >>>I may be wrong, but this is how I understand the system should work.
> >>>maybe you could instead use a language code for yekavian seberian, if
> >>>there is no ISO two-letter code it offers me the oppurtunity to ask any
> >>>one who may know, what should one do in a situation where the language
> >>>doesn't have an ISO code? 
> >>>     
> >>>
> >>One requests for an ISO code to be assigned for that language. See
> >>http://lcweb.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/.
> >>   
> >>
> >
> >That was interresting reading.  Is there a reason that we use the two
> >letter codes for locales, and not the three letter?  From reading that
> >site it seems the three letter would be more appropriate for
> >translations, is this simply a historical issue, or are there practical
> >reasons for the two letter codes being used?
> > 
> >
> 
> It seems that this is historical, since there's no mention of the format 
> of LANG in Single Unix Specification (superset/subset of POSIX).
> 
> See (may need to register, which is free, and a few keystrokes long):
> http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/functions/setlocale.html
> http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/basedefs/xbd_chap08.html
> 
> I can also see some practical issues, like some languages having two 
> three-letter codes, so we'd have to decide on one.
> 
> Other than that, because Gnu is Not Unix, we might as well force major 
> "Gnus" to change GNU libc only with major demonstrations in the cities 
> around the world ;-)

The two-letter language code is prescribed in the ISO standard for
naming POSIX locales, ISO/IEC 15897. We are enhancing
that standard so that you can also use 3-letter language codes,
if there is no two-letter language code.

Best regards
keld