Re: sr@Latn vs desktop files

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

mån 2003-05-19 klockan 15.56 skrev Alexander Larsson:
> I just noticed the new sr@Latn locale when i was building rpms of
> Nautilus 2.2.4.

Yes. "sr@Latn" in this case denotes Serbian with latin script. Serbian
with cyrillic script, which is reportedly more commonly used, is denoted
by the language code only; "sr".

This designation issue was discussed thoroughly on the gnome-i18n list
last month (see
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2003-April/msg00011.html and
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2003-April/msg00073.html
threads). The problem is that ISO 639-1 only assigns language codes, it
doesn't care about differences in scripts ("alphabets") used. Some
languages, like Serbian, can be, and are, used with more than one
script. So we need a naming scheme for distinguishing the Serbian
translations into the different scripts used.

Adding an encoding modifier to distinguish obviously doesn't help either
-- both cyrillic and latin scripts can be encoded with UTF-8. However,
adding a generic locale modifier after an @ sign is supported in locale
naming. In addition, there is a standards work in progress for
standardizing codes for different scripts (ISO 15924,
http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso15924/), which currently assigns
the code "Latn" for latin script.

So we decided to put the use of these together and let "sr@Latn" denote
Serbian with latin script.

The alternative that was used previously in GNOME was to use a
self-invented "language code" for Serbian with latin script; "sp".
However, such a hack is an abuse of the language code standard, and ugly
for several reasons. We didn't use it to denote a language per se, nor
was it an officially assigned ISO 639-1 language code, and things would
break horribly once such a language code really would be officially
assigned.

In that respect, using "sr@Latn" was much more appealing, and was less
likely to break standards. However, I doubt the specific case of desktop
key names was considered. If the desktop spec doesn't support the
generic @ modifier, perhaps it needs to be modified to do that, or the
use of "sr@Latn" to denote Serbian with latin script be revised.

Suggestions welcome.


Christian