Re: Unannonced team de_BY or mistake?

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

tis 2003-12-16 klockan 14.10 skrev Gerfried Fuchs:
> >>  de_BY is usually used for "German in Bavaria", not Belarus. In Bavaria
> >> they have a quite funny (or strange) slang. So you might think of it as
> >> en_scottish or similar, if you like.
> > 
> > Google search for de_BY turned out only sporadic mentions (if we count
> > out gdesklets and everything related like .spec files) of it in
> > relation to Bavaria, so I must doubt that it really is "usually used".
> 
>  Well, in discussions in germany (or even austria) it is referenced to
> quite commonly, more like a joke. And I would guess that it was done
> just as a joke, noone partly sensible would use such a locale for daily
> work :)

Even if "de_BY" is commonly used as a joke in daily talk, it doesn't
make such a locale naming more correct. Locale naming is always based on
the "languagecode_COUNTRYCODE" format as Danilo pointed out, where
languagecode is an official language code taken from the ISO-639
standard, and COUNTRYCODE is an official country code from ISO-3166.
So while "de" is correct for German, "BY" is very much incorrect since
in this case it's clearly not anything that has with Belarus, for which
"BY" is the country code, to do.

As Karl also already pointed out, the locale naming specification allows
for free-form modifiers to the locale naming that can be used for any
information that doesn't otherwise fit in the locale naming. So
"de@bavarian" would be ok per the specs.

Still, I don't think that it should be in cvs. "de_BY.po" is obviously
very much incorrect and in my opinion it should be removed as soon as
possible to avoid further confusion.
But I also think that we don't need a "de@bavarian.po" in cvs, since
adding one such file to gdesklets makes the translation status pages
think we have an additional language team for the whole of GNOME, and I
think the teams lists are already crowded as they are right now, without
the help of any "fictional teams" like de@bavarian, sv@swedishchef etc.


Christian