Subject: Re: locale category for sound

From: [email-masked] (Erik M. van der Poel)
Date: Sun, 28 Jul 91 16:47:47 +0900

Donn Terry writes:
> I suggest, strongly, that we concentrate on completing, solidly, all the
> areas we still don't have good solutions for (but at least we understand
> most of the problem) before ranging further afield.

I, personally, am still working on the current, unfinished i18n stuff.
The sound locale stuff is just something I was asked about by a
university researcher, and I simply forwarded the request to this
group.

> Messaging isn't done; some RE work remains; the comments made by Mike
> Karels reflect some very hard problems; we don't KNOW that we've got
> collation right yet (as Karels points out, we may have gone too far, but
> there are others who believe we havn't gone far enough), etc.  Look,
> we don't even really have a workable international character set yet!

Yup, and we're trying to put this immature research into a "standard"
that the US government will probably mandate.

I have already said a couple of times that some of the i18n stuff in
POSIX.2 (and maybe elsewhere) is simply not yet proven, and shouldn't
be put in those specs, whether people seem to demand it or not.

> However, to the extent
> that it's not presented as research, it either can become something we
> "have" to do, just because it was mentioned, or become the part of
> someone else's expectation of what we have to do.

Maybe I didn't actually use the word "research" in my message, but
it's pretty obvious that the intention was to do research.

> I'd hate to have
> that get in the way of getting what's almost done, done.

OK, in the future I'll try to distinguish between "research" and real
"spec'ing".

Regards,
EvdP