[Rd] Region subtag in package 'Language' field

Jeroen Ooms jeroenooms at gmail.com
Sun Dec 17 15:52:29 CET 2017


I am looking for the appropriate field to let package authors to
declare the pkg documentation language for spell checkers. The most
important case is to specify a preference between "en-US" or "en-GB"
which can be used by the hunspell or spelling pkg to select the
appropriate dictionary.

WRE defines the "Language" field for documentation language, but from
the current description it seems restricted to 2 or 3 letter ISO-639
codes such as "en" or "eng". WRE also mentions rfc-5646, which refers
to ISO 3166-1 for region/country subtags but it is unclear if these
are allowed in the field?

Spell checking libraries (e.g. myspell/hunspell) typically use
locale-like language names to identify the appropriate dictionary such
as "en_GB" or "de_AT", see for example [1,2]. Merely specifying "en"
or "de" is ambiguous to the spell checker. I was wondering if the WRE
definition of the "Language" field could allow for this?



[1] https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/hunspell-en/contents/
[2] https://packages.debian.org/stretch/hunspell-en-gb



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