Re: Date Format with month names in genitive case - your opinions?

[Rafal Luzynski <digitalfreak lingonborough com>]

22.01.2018 11:53 keld keldix com wrote:
> [...]
> Yes, I think this change is not clean design. We should keep the meaning of
> mon
> to be the nominative name of the month.
> Otherwise it would break cal and other programs
> Making a new notion for what we need here like genitive form, would be a
> cleaner design.
>
> When we make the change, and we apply it in a locale, we can then both change
> the
> date format and the info for the genitive form. As this can happen
> simultaneously,
> there is no need for backwards compatibility for the date format.

And we would have to make the same change in dozens of other applications
as well. This has been discussed and decided at developers' level already.
Indeed, it will break cal and few other applications but at the same time
automagically will fix lots of other applications.

> The idea of CLDR to use %Om for uppercased first letter is to me another
> case of bad design. How can an application know that for languages using
> genitinve
> names this would apply and it would be good to have for all other languages
> the month
> name spelled with an initial upper case?

Of course it will depend on the language (actually: the locale data)
whether and how it will work.

> And why should languages with genitive month
> names not have the possibility to have an initial upper case?

True, I'd like the same for the inflected languages as well.
I don't read this as "other languages should use it for lower/uppercase
month names" but "other languages can use it, if they want".
Otherwise we have to say that this change has no use for other
languages (which is not bad, OTOH).

> In my mind it would be better to have a special formatting letter to say that
> the initial letter should be upper case, and that would then also apply
> to abbereviations and day names.

I definitely agree and this is on my radar. Any idea of such a format specifier?

> POSIX has recently also adressed the problem end made new provisions,
> I think we should look carefully into this. Has this been done?

Could you please provide a link to these new provisions in POSIX?
I'm not aware of them.

Regards,

Rafal