Locale bringup and barriers for entry

[Marcel Schneider via CLDR-Users]

On 24/09/18 18:52 Steven R. Loomis wrote:
[…]
> I'm not sure what is meant by 'extensions to the DTD'.  In any event, CLDR pluralization has proven to be largely successful in practice.
> Do you have any specific concern about CLDR plurals? Is there a bug filed?
 
I’d filed this bug about French plurals:

https://unicode.org/cldr/trac/ticket/11302
Ordinal minimal pairs for French
 
Although as noted there, most other locales are unaffected. 
I’ve just extrapolated from this that some issues may be awaiting new locales, and that when facing barriers, 
getting them out of the way may require the DTD to be extended, so submitters should be ready to file tickets, 
as we’re often prompted to do by the SurveyTool information panel.
 
[…]
> > 
> > Before including this functionality in SurveyTool, where it belongs in, I think that the spec should be redesigned, and the documentation updated 
> > accordingly. That could eventually result in extended language support by CLDR/ICU, which would do no harm but only raise the product value.
>
> Redesigned how? Again - do you have any specific concern about CLDR plurals? Is there a bug filed?
 
My concern is that CLDR seems not to take gender into account when providing plural rules, but I was told that gender is not inside the scope.
The fact is that nouns may inflect differently depending on whether they are feminine or masculine.
 
> > >  - allowing some locales to 'get started' without plural rules?
> > 
> > I think that any locale may get started in CLDR when providing date and time formats, while correctly displaying a reminder of a shopping cart 
> > may be left over for a later stage.
>
> That's the general idea. (And a good way to put it, as a 'shopping cart'.) 
 
The idea isn’t mine. Here is the documentation locus where I got it from:
 
http://cldr.unicode.org/index/cldr-spec/plural-rules#TOC-Non-inflecting-Nouns-Pronouns
 
> Perhaps any data item that depends on plurals ( currency category, compact decimal category, etc. )
> would be 'locked' until it is unlocked by the input of plural data.
 
Provided that “locking” an item won’t cause a blank or another sort of bug. 
When a user sees an item not pluralized where it is expected to be plural, 
then simply inferring that pluralization isn’t ready might be straightforward.
There will surely be some IF in the code to prevent the app from crashing.
 
Glad that the discussion has restarted. Perhaps I was too impatient.
 
Regards,
 
 
Marcel