Re: Serbian (sr) language translation team: maintainer unresponsive

[Danilo Segan <dsegan gmx net>]

Charles Voelger wrote:

>On Lun, 2003-04-07 at 17:11, Christian Rose wrote:
>  
>
>>mån 2003-04-07 klockan 23.02 skrev Charles Voelger:
>>    
>>
>>>I may be wrong, but this is how I understand the system should work.
>>>maybe you could instead use a language code for yekavian seberian, if
>>>there is no ISO two-letter code it offers me the oppurtunity to ask any
>>>one who may know, what should one do in a situation where the language
>>>doesn't have an ISO code? 
>>>      
>>>
>>One requests for an ISO code to be assigned for that language. See
>>http://lcweb.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/.
>>    
>>
>
>That was interresting reading.  Is there a reason that we use the two
>letter codes for locales, and not the three letter?  From reading that
>site it seems the three letter would be more appropriate for
>translations, is this simply a historical issue, or are there practical
>reasons for the two letter codes being used?
>  
>

It seems that this is historical, since there's no mention of the format 
of LANG in Single Unix Specification (superset/subset of POSIX).

See (may need to register, which is free, and a few keystrokes long):
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/functions/setlocale.html
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/basedefs/xbd_chap08.html

I can also see some practical issues, like some languages having two 
three-letter codes, so we'd have to decide on one.

Other than that, because Gnu is Not Unix, we might as well force major 
"Gnus" to change GNU libc only with major demonstrations in the cities 
around the world ;-)

Cheers,
Daneelo