FYI. Discussion from users unhappy about changes.
At 09:27 +0200 2003-07-12, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>On Saturday, July 12, 2003 6:51 AM, Doug Ewell <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Philippe Verdy <verdy_p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:
>>
>> > Good luck with ISO language codes which does not even
>> > define them, and contain many duplicate codes even in
>> > the Alpha-2 space (he/iw, in/id), or unprecize codes
>> > matching sometimes very imprecize families of languages
>> > overlapping other language codes...
>>
>> The codes "iw" for Hebrew and "in" for Indonesian were deprecated
>> FOURTEEN YEARS AGO. It is not accurate or fair to refer to them as
>> "duplicates" of "he" and "id". The Registration Authority deprecates
>> such codes, rather than deleting them, for backward compatibility with
>> any data that might contain the old codes.
>
>I was sure also that "iw" was not used today, until I found that it is
>still used in Java on Windows, for legacy reasons... Creating a resource
>bundle in Hebrew with the code "he" was simply... ignored. So I had to
>rename it to "iw".
>
>Shamely, on Linux or various Unixes the correct code to use for locales
>varies, and it comes from the user-environment settings, actually setup
>by a system profile, most of the time... Users that want to get the
>benefit of existing locales for Hebrew will constantly need to change
>between "he" and 'iw". The "normal" installation solution is still today
>to create a file link between "he" and "iw" resources, so that they both
>can be used.
>
>I was really disappointed when I saw that these legacy language codes
>were not simplifiable the way we think, by ignoring "iw" and "in", and still
>today, Java does not offer a way to create "links" at runtime to resolve
>locales with equivalent ids, without duplicating resources or creating
>special rules with: if ( code="he"|| code="iw" )
>(don't forget that Java has also run-time resources with no files)...
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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