Re: Changes in nl_langinfo() and strftime() API in glibc

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Rafal,

> did not
> the documentation mention that a full date is a date with
> the day number included?

No, I don't see a definition of the term "full date" or "complete date"
there.

> The issue is when the day number and the month name appear
> together.
> ...
> So, when there is no day number (and nothing similar, like
> "the second week of" or "the first Sunday of") the month
> name counts as standalone, a nominative case.

Good. Here you have formulated the precise statement that I sought for.

Can you please update the doc accordingly? Change
  "when the month is used as part of a complete date"
to
  "when the month appears together with a day-of-month".

(AFAICS strftime does not support week-of-month statements, only
week-of-year.)

> As you can see, it is too
> long to put it into the documentation. I think I should write
> a blog article about it.

A blog goes away someday; the documentation is there to stay and
to be improved. Please mention the essential statements in the doc;
the extra linguistic explanations with styczeń and stycznia can
indeed go in a blog.

> Short answer to all your questions: whatever date format you use
> you should make it translatable, like:
> 
>     strftime (s, max, _("%A, %B %d, %y), ...
> 
> so you leave the correct format for the translators.

Ah, but translators will not look in the glibc manual. They read only
the gettext manual. So do we need some text in the gettext manual as
well? In other words, is the %B / %OB distinction something that the
programmer can do, and the translator is not bothered about it? Or
is this distinction different according to language, so the translators
must deal with it?

Bruno