[NUT-devel] questions about "Language" info packets

[Clemens Ladisch]

Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 14, 2007 at 09:32:48AM +0100, Clemens Ladisch wrote:
> > Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> > > On Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 03:36:34PM -0500, Rich Felker wrote:
> > > [...]
> > > > > So ISO 3166 is out, too?
> > > > 
> > > > I'm against 2-letter codes. The number of languages is way too large
> > > > for these codes to be remotely sufficient.
> > > 
> > > ISO 3166 is about country codes and about half of the codes from the 2
> > > letter codespace seem to be used or reserved in some way ...
> > 
> > But should three-letter country codes be allowed?
> 
> i dont know, but i would prefer if either 2 or 3 letter codes would be
> used but not both ...

Each 3-letter code has a corresponding 2-letter code, and I just noticed
that ISO doesn't publish the 3-letter codes for free, so I think country
codes should use the 2-letter form.

> > In that case, how should the entire language string be formatted?
> > Something like "lll-ccc" where both "lll" and "-ccc" are optional?
> 
> that is a good question, i also thought of lll-ccc when i was working on that
> part of the spec
> seems it was never explicitly writen in the spec though :(
> "-ccc"  though seems invalid to me it rather should be
> "unk-ccc" or "mul-ccc"

New proposal:

    "Language"
        An ISO 639-2 (three-letter) language code, optionally followed by an
        ISO 3166-1 two-letter country code that is separated from the language
        code by a hyphen.  All codes defined in ISO 639-2 are allowed,
        including "und" (Undetermined), "mul" (Multiple languages) and the
        bibliographic/terminology variants.
        see http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php and
        http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-code-lists/list-en1.html
        a demuxer MUST ignore unknown language and country codes instead of
        treating them as an error


Regards,
Clemens