Re: index sorting in texi2any in C issue with spaces

[Patrice Dumas]

On Mon, Feb 05, 2024 at 06:14:16PM +0000, Gavin Smith wrote:
> > > There wouldn't any harm in implementing it as an option.  We'd have to
> > > decide if it went via strxfrm_l, Unicode::Collate::Locale, or configurable
> > > for either.
> > 
> > I think that we should decide it now in order to have a fully specified
> > interface, even if it is not fully implemented.  To me it would seems
> > much more logical to have it be similar to COLLATION_LANGUAGE as it is
> > the correct one.
> 
> Makes sense, that way we can avoid being stuck with bad decisions.  Could
> it be DOCUMENTLANGUAGE_COLLATION, so
> 
> texi2any -c DOCUMENTLANGUAGE_COLLATION=1
> 
> Is there not a customization variable called "documentlanguage" as well?

There is.  It sets or overrides @documentlanguage.

> One possibility is to get rid of COLLATION_LANGUAGE and do it through
> "documentlanguage", like
> 
> texi2any -c DOCUMENTLANGUAGE_COLLATION=1 -c documentlanguage=se
> 
> instead of
> 
> texi2any -c COLLATION_LANGUAGE=se
> 
> This would not be as flexible, though, as documentlanguage affects
> other things (e.g. translations, what language the output is marked
> as in some output formats).

I would propose to keep COLLATION_LANGUAGE as a separate customization
variable for the reason you mention, users may want a collation
different from the @documentlanguage.  The possibility to use

  texi2any -c DOCUMENTLANGUAGE_COLLATION=1 -c documentlanguage=se

would still be there too.

> Can we also think if there is an alternative to the word "language"
> in the name of COLLATION_LANGUAGE?  The manual for Unicode::Collate::Locale
> gives a possibility of "de__phonebook" and "German phonebook" does not
> count as a language.  COLLATE_RULES?  COLLATE_TAILORING?  Maybe
> COLLATE_LOCALE?  (The last matches the usage of Unicode::Collate::Locale.
> This is disregarding the meaning of COLLATE_LOCATE that I previously
> suggested).

I do not like COLLATE_LOCALE, I think that it is very ambiguous, the
other names are fine for me.  To me the use of language in
COLLATION_LANGUAGE was to mark that the intent of the customization
vaiable is to specify a linguistic collation rule for indices using
language names that should be similar to @documentlanguage names.

-- 
Pat