[Mailman-i18n] Language/Country code question

[Martin von Loewis]

> Somewhere on the net, I learned that LOCALE should be a combination of
> Language/Country with a form of la_CO with the country part
> optional.

That is common, indeed. See below for the relevance of encodings,
though.

> 
> So, there should be zh_TW and zh_CN instead of big5 and gb.
> Am I right?

Not sure what mailman is doing, however, either appears to be wrong,
based on the following rationale:

- a locale/catalog should not, per se, be based on the
  encoding. Instead, at run-time, the program should convert from one
  encoding to another. Is it true that big5 and gb can be converted
  forth and back for all practical purposes?

- The locales zh_TW and zh_CN may differ, but the catalogs should
  *only* differ if the translations are actually different. There is
  no point in duplicating work if the Chinese and the Taiwanese
  translator come up with the same translation (perhaps in a different
  encoding).

If you want to put the encoding into a locale, it normally goes after
the country, i.e. zh_TW.big5 and zh_CN.gb; other combinations should
also be possible, like zh_TW.gb or zh_CN.UTF-8.

Regards,
Martin