[Belocs-locales-data] Introduction

[Denis Barbier]

Hi future readers,

Here are some random notes about this project on Alioth.
Its aim is to provide many more locale files to be used by GNU libc,
and to improve the current ones.  GNU libc maintainers have a very
conservative approach, so making changes is quite hard and requests
are stalled for months before being processed.
This project takes an opposite approach: release early, release often.
I believe that after several tries and fails, locale files should be
in a much better shape.
Of course, if submitters want to see their changes incorporated into
GNU libc, they should file bug reports at their Bugzilla; I won't do
that since this project was essentially created to focus on improving
locales files instead of trying in vain to push changes into GNU libc.

So the corollaries are:
  * We have to carefully register any change and by who it was
    requested.  Thus when someone wants to revert or modify it,
    we can ask both parties and find a consensus.
  * We need to be reactive.
  * We need to have a large audience and help people understanding
    how to write locale files.
  * Our locale files have to be used by GNU libc runtime functions
    without patching this library.

I am working for 6 months on Debian packages, but will be glad to
make them more distro-neutral if other people are interested in
them.  Localedef is currently quite buggy, so I had to fix it in
order to process our modified locale files.  Of course output
compiled format is unchanged, the only change is in parsing locale
files.
These packages are:
  * belocs-locales-data: Locales files 
      http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/belocs-locales-data
  * belocs-locales-bin: Modified versions of GNU locale and
    localedef binaries
      http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/belocs-locales-bin

TODO items:
  * Make HTML pages for http://belocs.alioth.debian.org/
  * Write documentation on locale specifications.
  * Investigate the problems with UNDEFINED in collation rules
     http://www.uclibc.org/downloads/Glibc_vs_uClibc_Differences.txt
     http://sources.redhat.com/ml/libc-alpha/2003-09/msg00046.html
  * Update iso14651_t1 (maybe convert it automatically from Unicode?)
  * Think about version control.  These packages are currently
    maintained with GNU Arch on my desktop computer and mirrored on
      http://people.debian.org/~barbier/{archives}/barbier@debian.org--2004/
  * Automatically track changes in GNU libc locales files and CLDR,
    and send weekly reports to this mailing list.
  * Add 'first week on day' for many locales.
  * etc.

Denis