Re: [musl] setlocale() again

[Pablo Correa Gomez <pabloyoyoista@postmarketos.org>]

Hi Alastair,

I'm Pablo, one of postmarketOS maintainers, and by chance bumped into
this thread. I am super happy that you sent these messages, since I am
in the process of adding support for musl into Glib test suite, and
bumped into exactly the same problem as you did.

From the developer perspective, I really like your proposal. However,
from the user and distro maintainer perspective, I am a bit more
hesitant. As daily user of an alpine system localized in Spanish, I
acknowledge and identify the problem that you present of "1,024" vs
"1.024". However, I would argue that such thing is a small problem,
compared to completely losing localization in Spanish. In practice, I
would say both these examples are only theoric, since both Spanish and
French are supported musl-locales. 

So my real concern, is what could happen to all those users of
languages not supported by musl locales and that currently (to some
extent) have their systems localized? We did a call some months ago for
users with a use in localization to communicate with us to help us
forward and validate possible changes in musl. Unfortunately we only
really had one to two users show up, so possibly the breakage would not
be that big, considering a big chunk of European languages are
currently supported by musl-locales. Do you have any thoughts about
this situation? If this change ever happened, we could of course notify
users both in alpine and postmarketOS in our release notes. But maybe
it would also be helpful if we could have some guidelines or process
for users interested in localization to raise the lack of support for
their language, and how they can fix it?

It's very encouraging to find other people that care about
localization. Thanks a lot, and kind regards,
Pablo.


On lun, 2023-09-18 at 15:18 +0100, Alastair Houghton wrote:
> Hi all (Rich especially though :-))
> 
> Has anyone had time to take a look at this? I’d like to make some
> progress on this front if possible.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Alastair.
> 
> > On 5 Sep 2023, at 13:57, Alastair Houghton <ahoughton@apple.com>
> > wrote:
> > 
> > On 10 Aug 2023, at 16:51, Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org> wrote:
> > > 
> > > On Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 04:41:38PM +0100, Alastair Houghton
> > > wrote:
> > > > I spent some time today looking at the setlocale() problem and
> > > > thought I’d put some notes down in an email.
> > 
> > 
> > [snip]
> > 
> > > At this point, it's been quite a while since I looked at the
> > > mechanisms. If you'd like to help move this forward, rather than
> > > starting with a patch, writing a high-level natural language
> > > description of how you'd make the changes (in terms of musl's
> > > current
> > > internal representation for locale state) would be the most
> > > helpful.
> > > If I'm forgetting and there's already such a good description,
> > > just
> > > digging it up and citing it might be fine.
> > 
> > 
> > I wrote something up here:
> > 
> > https://gist.github.com/al45tair/15c3ade52b09d0cad67074176ad43e4a
> > 
> > Let me know what you think; I can update the document there until
> > we’re happy that we’ve got the right solution, then I should be
> > able to create a patch and get the relevant permission from my
> > employer to submit it.
> > 
> > Kind regards,
> > 
> > Alastair.
> > 
>