[icu-design] CLDR/ICU proposal: collation rules for import only

[Richard Wordingham]

On Fri, 02 May 2014 08:14:39 -0700
"Doug Ewell" <doug at ewellic.org> wrote:

> Richard Wordingham <richard dot wordingham at ntlworld dot com> wrote:
> 
> >> which in ICU would turn into
> >>     [import ja-u-co-private-kana]
> >
> > I've been struggling to follow this, but should the key word be
> > 'partial' or 'component' rather than 'private'.  There's nothing
> > private about the rules one intends to share.
> 
> In standards like these, "private" doesn't mean "secret." It means
> "not defined by the standard, but by end users, using a mechanism
> built into the standard for that purpose." Private agreements can be
> distributed very publicly.

Are these then meant to be sets of rules that will not be stable from
one issue of CLDR to the next?  My example of a German Assyriological
collation was not mean to be flippant, though it is seems to be
prohibited from being a variant in CLDR -
http://cldr.unicode.org/index/cldr-spec/collation-guidelines says, "The
CLDR goals are to match the sorting of exemplar letters and common
punctuation and leave everything else to the standard UCA ordering".

Steven Loomis suggested a very different meaning of 'private' - 'not
accessible to end users'.

> See, for example, the Unicode Private Use Area and the code elements
> in ISO 15924 that are "reserved for private use."

End user control of the PUA is generally pretty feeble, though some
components provide the ability to implement end user control.

Richard.