Re: [RFC][PATCH v8 05/16] Implement the %OB specifier - alternative month names (bug 10871)

[Zack Weinberg <zackw at panix dot com>]

On 06/28/2017 06:03 AM, Rafal Luzynski wrote:
> Some languages (Slavic, Baltic, etc.) require a genitive case of the
> month name when formatting a full date (with the day number) while
> they require a nominative case when referring to the month standalone.

I'm not familiar with the guts of str[pf]time_l at all, so I cannot
comment on the correctness of your actual code changes here.

> Note that it is not yet decided whether %OB will return the
> standalone case (usually nominative) and %B will return the full
> date context case (usually genitive) or vice versa.  It depends
> on the locale database and localized format strings which may vary
> with the locales and depend on what a language community decides.

I don't think that this decision (whether %OB will return the standalone
case and %B will return the contextual case, or vice versa) should be
allowed to be locale-dependent.  The decision of *which grammatical form
is appropriate* for each context is obviously locale-dependent, but the
rule of which formatter is for which context needs to be consistent
across all locales, so that the _call to strftime_ itself doesn't need
to be locale-dependent.  (Not everyone is going to use %x and %X.)

zw