On Thu, 07 Feb 2019 at 14:05:33 +0100, Adam Borowski wrote:
> a locale for a silly country with weird customs
Please don't take this tone. Insulting people who disagree with you[1]
is rarely an effective way to persuade them that you're right and
they're wrong.
> • promoting C.UTF-8 in our user interfaces (allowing to select it in d-i,
> making dpkg-reconfigure locales DTRT, making it the d-i default)
I think this is exactly the "international/culture-neutral English"
locale that you're looking for. (Well, the C/POSIX locale is the formally
standardized form of that, but breaks text outside the ASCII range;
C.UTF-8 is the C locale with Unicode support added.)
> • inventing a new locale "en" without a country bias
> -- good in the long term but problematic a month before freeze
I assume this would be a UTF-8 locale like en_US.utf8 and en_GB.utf8,
so probably en.utf8, possibly with a simple "en" alias?
As you say, I don't think a country-neutral specifically-English locale
is going to happen before buster.
How would this locale differ from C.UTF-8? Is the only difference
that C.UTF-8 has strict lexicographical sorting, whereas "en" would have
case-insensitive sorting like en_GB.utf8 does? (If that's the only
difference, then perhaps something like "LANG=C.utf8 LC_COLLATE=en_US.utf8"
is enough.)
smcv
[1] As it happens, I do agree with you that AM/PM time and middle-endian
dates are not a good default; but I'm from a different English-speaking
country with its own weird customs.
