Re: Date Format with month names in genitive case - your opinions?

[Rafal Luzynski <digitalfreak lingonborough com>]

17.05.2017 22:42 Милош Поповић <gpopac gmail com> wrote:
> Hello Rafal,
>
> You made it clear now and I do support your idea of incorporating genitive in
> glibc. Maybe it would be better to stick to %B for nominative and %OB for
> genitive for Serbian. I will post the idea to Serbian translation team(s)
> mailing list and we will see what to do with CLDR.


Thank you, Miloš. And thank you everybody who replied in this thread.
It seems to me that my idea of introducing %OB which will generate
the nominative case and switch the existing %B into the genitive case
is acceptable in most of the languages which need this except Serbian,
Czech, and maybe Slovak which would prefer %B to generate nominative
(as it is normally used in dates in those languages) while they still
sometimes need also a genitive case which can be generated by %OB.
This is possible if you provide locale data in glibc correctly and then
use them in translated format strings in a way matching the locale data.

However, this approach will have one fallout: nl_langinfo(ALTMON_x) will
generate the nominative case in all other languages while it will
generate the genitive case in those two or three. The solutions are:

* deprecate nl_langinfo() as a way to obtain the list of months,
  use strftime() only - that's not so wrong idea as it is tricky
  already and I spot bugs even in FreeBSD and OS X;
* give up on the genitive case in Serbian, Czech, and maybe Slovak
  as they are used too rarely.

I'll write a similar post to glibc-alpha list.

Best regards,

Rafal