Ubuntu Wiki

• Created: Date(2005-09-26T18:35:38Z) by JeffBailey

• People: JeffBailey, JordiMallach, MartinPitt

• Contributors: JeffBailey

• Status: DraftSpecification

• Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/belocs-locales

• Packages affected: locales, langpacks, belocs-locales-data

Summary

In order to serve our user communities better, we need to be more responsive and proactive with localisation updates.

Rationale

Getting locale changes into upstream glibc is unnecessarily hard. The glibc maintainer (correctly) requires proof of the correctness of a change before it's included, but the onus of demonstrating that change falls to the glibc package maintainers. The package maintainers are frequently not qualified to provide this proof, and cannot answer upstreams questions to the needed degree of satisfaction. The glibc upstream maintainer also has a well deserved reputation for being difficult to approach with changes.

In addition, updating locales requires a complete rebuild of the glibc package. This is a very time and resource intensive build just for the sake of arch-indep files.

Use cases

• Agloolik lives in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada and has been using Rosetta to do translations, but wants his gnome calendar to correctly use Sunday as the first day of the week.
• Locales maintainer wants to upload new locales, but does not want to force a rebuild of the entire glibc source.

Scope

• Locales / Belocs-locales-data(universe) packaging
• Langpacks

Design

Implementation

First stage is to remove locales package from glibc build.

Second, the belocs-locales data needs to be merged into language packs build. There would need to be a lang-pack-base that included things such as the locale-gen script from locales, was able to build the locales upon installation and selection. The lang-pack-base locales list would be generated based on files placed in /etc/locales/supported.d/ (or other proper location). Files in this directory seeded from the lang-packs.

The language pack base would then conflict with the old (obsoleted) locales package.

Lang-packs would included all of the proper locales for that language (e.g. en_* for English).

Code

Requires somewhat extensive packaging changes for the lang-packs.

Data preservation and migration

Belocs-locales seems to want to be a superset of glibc locales, but it appears to be missing several locales that are in glibc proper. If anything is missing from belocs, then either the missing part needs to be investigated for inclusion aswell. It may be that ones missing from belocs just don't work, or are no longer needed.

Outstanding issues

None

BoF agenda and discussion

CategorySpec