On Sun, Jan 21, 2018 at 10:54:52PM +0100, Petr Kovar wrote:
On Sun, 21 Jan 2018 00:10:28 +0100 (CET) Rafal Luzynski <digitalfreak lingonborough com> wrote:In case of Czech, Serbian and (probably) Slovak the case is controversial. As far as I was told, in those languages the nominative case is used normally in dates unless whole date is in a genitive case. However,Not sure who provided you with this information, but for Czech, this is not quite true. While using nominative for %B is not exactly incorrect (so the current implementation can be seen as acceptable), being able to use genitive for %B would allow us to provide a translation that sounds more natural.
That's right.
However, changing anything in glibc is very tricky so I won't vote for this change without hearing what other Czech translators think. I think other language groups might share the same sentiment, actually.
It's not tricky. It's incompatible. "%B" means a month name in a dictionary
form (i.e. nominativ in case of flective languages) now. Existing translations
of other programs expect it and changing in into a different form would break
them.
I'm unable to decide if the change is overall positive of negative. But
if it happens, it needs proper documentation in nl_langinfo(3), strftime(3)
etc. E.g. nl_langinfo(3) reads:
MON_{1–12} (LC_TIME) Return name of the n-th month.
With the proposed change it would return the non-dictionary form that cannot
be used a standalone label and that's wrong. Try running "cal" command.
Also MON and ALT_MON difference should not be explained with cases. Cases are
a language specific matter. It should talk about "a dictionary form" and "a
form used in a date string".
Actually the more I think about it the less I like the change. How do you want
to solve the breakage of nl_langinfo(3) that's defined by POSIX? I'd rather
reverse the change. Keep MON for the dictionary form and use ALT_MON for the
date form and either change strftime's "%x" and "%c" definitions to use
ALT_MON instead or keep the decision up to translators of the glibc.
-- Petr
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