Re: [PATCH v2] Added Fiji Hindi language locale for Fiji

[Carlos O'Donell <carlos at redhat dot com>]

On 07/07/2017 08:05 AM, Florian Weimer wrote:
> On 07/07/2017 01:45 PM, Mike FABIAN wrote:
>> Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On 07/06/2017 05:24 AM, Akhilesh Kumar wrote:
>>>> [BZ #21207]
>>>>        * locales/hif_FJ: New file.
>>>>        * SUPPORTED: Add hif_FJ/UTF-8.
>>>>        * iso-639.def: Add DEFINE_LANGUAGE_CODE3 ("Fiji Hindi", hif, hif).
>>>
>>> What's our policy regarding backporting of new locales?  Should we add
>>> new locales during the freeze?
>>
>> I asked Siddhesh and he said it is OK:
>>
>> <mfabian_> siddhesh: Now that glibc 2.26 freeze is ON, what about locale data
>>            changes like
>>            https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2017-07/msg00057.html ? Do these
>>            need to wait for 2.27 or is it OK to do such changes because if has
>>            an effect only on locale data and not source code?
>>                                                           [17年07月04日 14:15:44]
>> <siddhesh> mfabian_, I think locale data changes should be OK.  We do things
>>            like translation updates on a regular basis during freeze.
>>                                                           [17年07月04日 14:16:41]
> 
> I'm a bit concerned about the set of supported locales changing.  That's
> visible to applications to some extent, and if we keep making changes
> throughout the freeze, the Fedora mass rebuild will happen before the
> set of locales is finalized.  But maybe the risk of problems is quite
> low, and the kind of problems that would result from that are minor anyway.

In an upstream glibc release the SUPPORTED set of locales are built and
installed as part of the installation process, but almost no distribution
uses it that way. In Fedora we build the locale-archive and the broader set
of locale subpackages. So adding new SUPPORTED locales means we'll get new
subpackages for language packs, but because they are new, nobody could have
ever referenced them before.

I don't see any large risks in adding languages, which have no API or ABI
impact on the release. We are just updating data to be shipped wit the
release. We can similarly add such data in a point release too without
problems. So I don't see why we wouldn't just do it in the official release.

As always it would be great if the locale updates were ready before the
freeze, but realize that Mike is busy handling a backlog of bugs, and there
is a lot of value in that. Eventually I expect the amount of work will
normalize and we'll be able to be more strict about changes near the freeze.

-- 
Cheers,
Carlos.