Re: ru_RU locale bug?

[E.Rodichev]

Dear Keld,

OK, now I understood your opinion. Unfortunately, there is the very strong
reason against it - it leads to incompatibility with many tools.

For example, many scripts and applications depends on /bin/ls -a
sorting, and were written *only* for english file names (before NLS
was introduced). These applications imply that .x will be sorted before x.

And it WAS true during many years.

But in the situation, if such script is used inside another application, which
needs russian locale essentially - for sorting *cyrillic* letters, the
latter will fail. Evidently, there are no way to use new locale on the
system where such application is intended to run.

I am pretty sure, then such kind of locale behaviour can not be accepted
because of compatibility. I may agree with you, then Aa sorting together
may be the right way (again, not sure that this way is the best, but 
acceptable),
but in my honest opinion the sorting of the first half ASCII *must* be
sorted as in C locale.

Now, in practice, I see only one way - to use old locale files, moving them
from old Linux distributions. In fact, it will lead for more and more
incovenience in the future.

What I'd like to suggest - to modify the locale in such a way, that does not
affect the us-ascii codes order. It looks like the optimum compromise
solution. What do you think about this way?

With best wishes,
E.R.

> > So, a lot of written software which expect the latter behaviour from
> > /bin/ls is broken with this new locale.
> >
> > It is very important problem for portability of Linux distributions
> > in Russia and many other countries with cyrillic-based languages. I am
> > not sure about ISO standards, but this way clearly leads to many troubles -
> > either for compatibility with old software, as well as with new one.
> >
> > I suppose that it will be much better to keep the traditional behaviour
> > of ru_RU locale, which does not affect the sorting of 7-bit ascii codes.
> >
> > For example, the ru_RU locale in new FreeBSD distributions does not lead
> > to any troubles and/or incompatibility (I just checked under FreeBSD
> > 4.5-STABLE). Is it a way for Linux to another direction?
>
> I don't know if this is a better direction. I am quite involved in the
> danish Linux environment and the change you indicate has been around for
> a while in Danish Linux. I have heard no complaints whatsoever from
> Danish users on this change. I believe there has been some complaints
> from other communities, however. From a general view, I do think that
> the current sorting of Aa together and ignoring special characters in
> the first round of comparisons is the way to go.
>
> Best regards
> Keld
>

_________________________________________________________________________
Evgeny Rodichev                                   Stack Technologies Ltd.
email: address@hidden
Phone: 007 (095) 939 2383
Fax:   007 (095) 932 8841                       http://www.sai.msu.su/~er