17 October, 2008

a Project Change from pa-IN to pa - Mission, not only word

Unicode make it clear that 'pa-gur-IN' is basic part of 'pa' locale

where pa-gur-IN Represent as < LANG >-< SCRIPT >-< REGION >
so Punjabi-Gurmukhi-India Script is actually making 'pa' locale.

So Most Project already using 'pa' is for Punjabi, quite few project
like mozilla is using pa-IN, which need to update.

A bug 380287 filed for Firefox/Thunderbird
updates.

I tried to file before Firefox 3 Release and asked to fix it, but
Mozilla Team was busy with other important task, so it was skipped.
Finally Team have a time and get back to it.

Unicode: http://www.unicode.org/cldr/bugs/locale-bugs?findid=1300
---------------------------------------------------------------------
pa (Stage 1) //Punjabi =
pa-IN (default)(unicode bug _above)
/ \
/ \
pa-arb pa-gur (Stage 2) //2 different Script
(Shahmukhi / Gurmukhi)
| |
pa-PK pa-IN (Stage 3)//Region based,
Pakistan India
---------------------------------------------------------------------

So, Now First we need to skip region based choice and to
original locale choice (that is 'pa'), which is important
as if you run a application, by giving pa-IN or pa-PK, and
no translation available for that, then application will check
for 'pa' translation. As 'pa' is default, so we need to use it
(as Unicode confirmed this).

What happened if Shahmukhi Script people want to start project
for Punjabi?
Surely they have to use script encoding with language like pa-arb
or pa@arb as there is script difference and only solution is to use
arb with pa and it is true for all projects. After all script is basic
difference, not region as any Shahmukhi Punjabi User can be
anywhere is world as Gurmukh Punjabi Script User are.

I got most response from NRI Punjabi people instead of India based.
so it is not good to attach a specific region with locale due to
population (census). I was never happy to divide a language
on basis of region, as Language has no boundary itself, but it
flow of ideas, freedom to express those, So we should make it
open and out of boundary. If I have operating system, then sometimes
it can be used to select timezone for locale automatic, but should
not be forced to use only that timezone. My Mac is showing
same issue as I selected Punjabi, then only Showing region as
India. Surely more Punjabi Mac users are outside India and
Apple is still confuse with "non-census" data. So
making my (our) locale region-free is important mission for me.

During working on bug, something interesting is pointed out that
mozilla got around 100 hits daily for Punjabi locale. It was
quite good figure, if I cared to my guess.

Hope to fix this issue soon as 'Seth' is working quite hard, but
I was worrying about his late comment in bug "will ask our Indic localizers
who write blogs to make the announcement."

let us see what is output of that...

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