Re: [musl] Locale support considered harmful noise

[Jacob Welsh <jacob+musl@welshcomputing.com>]

On Tue, 18 Feb 2020, A. Wilcox wrote:

> Why do you not believe that musl could provide any of these features
> using clear and concise code?

I fully expect it could. The point at issue however is whether it should 
be done at all.

> I have been personally impacted by the lack of LC_COLLATE support.

I have been personally "impacted" by its presence in glibc, but perhaps 
I'm not the sort of "real world" user whose needs you would like to 
represent.

> This will allow non-English speakers the ability to understand the
> errors that are happening on the computers they own.

You may be overestimating a bit there the abilities of most English 
speakers to "communicate with their computers" or specifically to decode 
error messages; anyway, what your approach actually does is to fragment 
the knowledge base and herd people *away* from where they might find the 
best information.

Now, this dispute is at least as old as the Protestant Reformation so I do 
not expect or require it to be settled here.

> In fact, musl is *not* conformant to the POSIX standard *because* it 
> does not implement the requisite locale support.

We're prepared to fork POSIX or any other document that proves necessary. 
Not like it's hard.

On the other hand, I suppose someone will get right to work translating 
POSIX and all the musl code and commentary to every presently spoken 
language, because after all they look mighty Anglocentric to me and no one 
coder's needs matter more than another's.

Sarcasm aside, I'm satisfied that our differences have been made clear and 
am happy to let it rest.

Yours truly,

J. Welsh
http://fixpoint.welshcomputing.com/