Bug 1015: request for new locale for Belarusian language variant (be_BY@tarask)

Greetings,

===
Prelude: This issue was raised at GNU C Library Bugzilla about five
years ago, and still there is no final resolution. Discussion on
Bugzilla is stalled, and it seems like active glibc maintainers and
contributors don't monitor it hence I write this email to
libc-locales@. It would be great to see some progress on this issue
and finally get this locale variant in upstream.

This email was sent to Libc Steering Committee but I was forwarded to this ML.
===

The Belarusian language community affiliated with open-source feels
there's a time for creating the additional sub-variant of the be_BY
locale (suggested name -- be_BY@tarask, where @tarask stands for a
special IANA registered -tarask modifier).

Such sub-variant would denote the locale data and text (translations
etc.) represented in the fairly popular in Belarusian community
informal variant of the Belarusian language, which is standardized in
the book:

"Беларускі клясычны правапіс. Збор правілаў. Сучасная нармалізацыя",
Audra, Вільня-Менск, 2005. (title translation: "Belarusian classical
orthography. Set of rules. Modern normalization.")

The community feels that the current situation, with locale and text
data mixing both of the variants, serves bad both translators and
users. Separation of  variants, like proposed, would facilitate both
effectiveness of translating process, for translators, and consistent
feel-of-product, for consumers. Among others, there were requests from
one of the local embedded hardware vendors who wanted to supply his
firmware with the aforementioned language variant support but felt the
lack of such locale in upstream GNU C Library distribution.

The issue had already been raised c.June 2005 as a Bugzilla issue
(http://sources.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1015), but then
the community didn't agree on some points (naming etc.), and the issue
was suspended. Now, sort of consensus has been reached and both
"sides" of the dispute are now endorsing this request to create the
additional sub-variant of the be_BY locale with suggested name of
be_BY@tarask.

The needed locale files are attached at the corresponding Bugzilla page.

Don't hesitate to ask me for any additional comments if needed. I also
put Belarusian localization mailing list in Cc in case you need to
hear from community.

Looking forward to hear from you soon,
Ihar Hrachyshka

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