Few notes on locale craziness

Back in the EAPI 6 guide I shortly noted that we have added a sanitization requirement for locales. Having been informed of another locale issue in Python (pre-EAPI 6 ebuild), I have decided to write a short note of locale curiosities that could also serve in reporting issues upstream.

When l10n and i18n are concerned, most of the developers correctly predict that the date and time format, currencies, number formats are going to change. It’s rather hard to find an application that would fail because of changed system date format; however, much easier to find one that does not respect the locale and uses hard-coded format strings for user display. You can find applications that unconditionally use a specific decimal separator but it’s quite rare to find one that chokes itself combining code using hard-coded separator and system routines respecting locales. Some applications rely on English error messages but that’s rather obviously perceived as mistake. However, there are also two hard cases…

Continue reading “Few notes on locale craziness”