GNU bug report logs - #6007
locale sort ordering confusion

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From: Bob Proulx <bob <at> proulx.com>
To: 6007 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#6007: en_US sorting is completely stupid.
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2010 17:42:39 -0600

Alan Curry wrote:
> Bob Proulx writes:
> > You don't like it and I don't like it but the-powers-that-be have
> 
> Who's the "power" here anyway? Who do we have to impeach? Seriously. The
> "en_US" locale is an unmitigated disaster. It's officially called "not a bug"
> every time it comes up, which seems to be once a week on this list alone, so
> what volume of complaints is required to tip the balance to "all right it's a
> damn bug let's fix it"?

As far as I know, which isn't as much as I would like especially in
this case, it is implemented in libc.  Therefore it would need to be
addressed with libc folks.

  http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/

But very likely the chain continues well beyond that point.  If you
find out, please educate me.

> From the name "en_US" one might guess that it represents the behavior
> expected by English-speaking users in or from the US. But those users have
> lived with computers for a generation or two. What they expect is
> ASCIIbetical. The only people who actually expect phone-book-style sorting
> are old geezers who remember what a phone book was. Most of them have never
> used a computer and never will, so why do we (and by "we" I mean whoever
> makes the locale rules) bend the default to accommodate them?

It would be nice to be able to set my locale to en_US <at> C.UTF-8 or
en_US <at> POSIX.UTF-8 and get a better behaved collation sequence.

Bob

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