Subject: [bug#70280] [PATCH 3/5] locale: Shrink ‘%default-locale-definitions’ from 34 to 10 locales.

From: "pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2024 00:32:38 +0200

Bonjour Ludo. :)

Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:
> Guten Tag Florian,
>
> "pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <[email-masked]> skribis:
>
>> I agree with shrinking default locales, but do not understand what
>> benefit it brings that U.N. languages are always included.  Perhaps it
>> would be more useful to include en_US only?
>
> My idea was to include by default a few locales that people may
> “typically” find useful, in addition to their chosen one.

Hmm but how would they use it?  Ohh I just noticed that these languages
configured here will be the options in the GNOME Settings.  I do agree
now that the six languages are a standard set, although Russian has less
speakers than Portuguese [1], which gets discussed [2] and I would tend
to also include Portuguese then, because it has translations unlike
Bengali or Hindi.

> Of course, it’s an arbitrary choice (choosing the six UN languages makes
> it slightly less arbitrary).
>
>> Locales like fr_CA and
>> ar_JO do not even have separate teams on translationproject.org.  There
>> are reasons for developers to include interesting locales for testing
>> like tr_TR or az_AZ, where capitalized i is İ and small I is ı, breaking
>> all kinds of programs, but few people would know.
>
> My goal is *not* to provide a default set useful for developers
> (otherwise German, Greek, Turkish, and non-UTF-8 locales would be
> welcome).
>
> Now, should we remove fr_CA and ar_JO?  Maybe!  I’m open to really any
> changes in this list; I just think it should go beyond en_US.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Ludo’.

I would remove ar_JO.  Probably also remove fr_CA, because someone from
Canada will configure fr_CA during Guix installation.

Regards,
Florian

[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers

[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_languages_of_the_United_Nations