[publican-list] Publican 1.0 nearly here

[Ruediger Landmann]

On 11/02/2009 01:04 AM, Miloš Komarčević wrote:
> The new F12 documents look truly stunning, kudos to the Publican team!
>
> The Publican User Guide gives nice directions for using language codes
> according to BCP47, but I do have a quick question about our Serbian
> Latin codes that are used in Fedora repositories. I realize everything
> out somehow when the po files are transferred back to xml, but I'm
> just confused with different filenames we have in there now: setting
> UI aside, for docs we have sr_Latn.po (the only option supported by
> DocBook before Publican), sr at latin.po (I haven't created these, so
> must have been generated by Publican), and in addition the sr-LATN
> subdirectories.
>
> Is there anything we can, or indeed should do to clean this situation
> up? My worry is that people from other projects who might take a peak
> will think these non-standard codes ok to use and they will just
> proliferate...
>    

Thanks for your kind words, Miloš.

Unfortunately, as you note, Serbian labelling is really a mess right 
now. As a friend of mine likes to say: "Standards are a good thing. 
There are so many to choose from!" :)

A brief recap:

Prior to Publican and Transifex: sr_Latn (what standard is that 
anyway?). There are still many files and directories with this name in 
the various repos.

Transifex 0.5 strictly insists on the locales as defined in glibc or it 
won't render the language name (although it will still serve the file), 
hence sr at latin in the Transifex branches of many F-11 docs. The 
situation is complicated because if a PO file with a particular name 
/ever/ existed, Transifex seems to remember it, so some repos have ended 
up with Serbian (Latin) files under both names.

On the other hand, Publican 0.x never handled script subtags properly, 
but by chance (not design!) happened to handle sr-LATN correctly, hence 
its use in the actual doc directories.

Moving forward:

As soon as F-12 is released, we can move all Publican sr-LATN 
directories to sr-Latn-RS, which Publican 1.0 handles correctly.

As soon as Fedora's Transifex instance is upgraded to 0.7 (or later), we 
can also move all sr_Latn and sr at latin to sr-Latn-RS, which Transifex 
0.7 handles correctly.

Hopefully, this will end the madness! And, like you say, prevent any 
confusion that we might cause up- or downstream.

It might be worth filing a bug against Fedora-Localization : 
l10n-requests so that we can track this work; feel free to assign it to me.

Finally, I note that the IANA register of subtags does not set any 
default script for Serbian (ie, the "Suppress-Script" parameter is not 
set). Therefore, Serbian, when written with the Cyrillic script is 
probably most accurately tagged sr-Cyrl; so perhaps we should move sr 
and sr-RS to sr-Cyrl-RS as well?

Cheers

Ruediger