Re: Encoding-named locale files in po_document

[Gavin Smith]

On Sat, Oct 28, 2023 at 09:04:45AM -0300, Rafael Fontenelle wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Browsing the source code repository, I noticed that the po_document
> directory [1] has a few locale files named with their encoding, like
> 'pt_BR.us-ascii.po' and 'pl.iso-8859-2.po'. Most of these have a more
> up-to-date $lang.po (it means duplication), except for the Norwegian
> translation that only has 'no.us-ascii.po'.
> 
> My suggestion is to remove these encoding-named locale files, except for
> Norwegian, for the reasons below.

Yes, I agree completely.  Thanks for looking into it and for explaining
the benefits of removing these files.

I had previously complained about the extra Polish translation file:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2023-10/msg00111.html

> These encoding-named locale files seem to have a long history in the source
> code, but currently only the $lang.po files are being updated with the
> contributions by translators from the TranslationProject[2] (or elsewhere).
> This can be confirmed looking at the date/time of their 'PO-Revision-Date'
> field.

I traced some of them to commit e2d195ff2779c
(Patrice Dumas, Thu Feb 25 08:25:59 2010 +0000).  Apparently they were
translation files for texi2html before they were used for texi2any.

The Norwegian translation file is dated 2001-01-01 (a suspicious-looking
date, actually).

It has a tiny number of working translations: for some variations of
"Contents", "Index", and the twelve months of the year.

I'm almost tempted to delete the file, but I will transfer it to
state a UTF-8 encoding as you suggest.

In some other translation files, Norwegian is nb rather than no (for
"Bokmål"), but apparently no is still fine.  I found this page:

https://icu.unicode.org/design/norwegian-locales-changes-in-v39

  In CLDR 39 and ICU 69, the locale code “no” (Norwegian) is no
  longer an alias (for CLDR and ICU purposes) and becomes the parent
  locale for locales "nb" (Norwegian Bokmål) and "nn" (Norwegian
  Nynorsk). The latter two locales retain their regional locales:
  “nb_NO”, “nb_SJ”, “nn_NO”. The locale code “no” is no
  longer deprecated.