country/region code is a code from ISO 3166. If the language
or region in question is missing in the ISO standard, one need
to get the ISO standard updated before the locale will be
- included in glibc.</p>
+ included in glibc. If one can't convince the ISO 639
+ maintainers that your language exists (and thus need a
+ language code), the glibc maintainers will refuse to add the
+ locale. In addition, the glibc maintainers seem to refuse
+ "artificial languages" like Esperanto and Lojban, even if they
+ got a ISO 639 code.</p>
<p>Little is known about the requirements for the naming of
modifiers. The following modifiers are currently used:
<h2>Reuse when possible</h2>
- - "copy" from existing locales if the content should be identical
+ <p>One should avoid cut-n-paste when possible, and instead use
+ the <tt>copy</tt> statement to include sections from locales
+ with identical content.</p>
<h2>LD_IDENTIFICATION</h2>
- - standard refs in the LD_IDENTIFICATION
+ <p>The category entries are references to the standard used when
+ writing the given section. The standard refs should have
+ quotes around them, and should not use the <U#>
+ notation. They should normally look something like this:</p>
- - quotes around the text
-
- - no <U#>, use normal ASCII
+ <blockquote><pre>
+category "i18n:1997";LC_IDENTIFICATION
+ </pre></blockquote>
<h2>LC_MESSAGES</h2>
- - yes/no expr should have the form ^[yYnN<extra>], without 0 and 1
- and without trailing ".*".
+ <p>Then yesexpr and noexpr entries should have the form
+ <tt>^[yY<extra>]</tt> and <tt>^[nN<extra>]</tt>,
+ without 0 and 1 and without trailing "<tt>.*</tt>". The
+ reason is to make sure the expressions have the same form as
+ the expressions used in the C/POSIX locale (<tt>^[yY]</tt> and
+ <tt>^[nN]</tt>).</p>
<h2>Standard documents and specifications</h2>
localedef -i de_DE@euro -c -f ISO-8859-15 de_DE
LANG=de_DE date
</pre>
+
+ <p>I've made a small tool <a href="check-locale">check-locale</a>
+ capable of detecting a few common mistakes with locales</p>
</div>
<address><a href="mailto:pere@hungry.com">Petter Reinholdtsen</a></address>
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+Last modified: Mon Dec 20 20:17:59 CET 2004
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