The Unicode Standard and ISO

Sat Jun 9 01:23:33 CDT 2018

On Fri, 8 Jun 2018 09:20:09 -0700, Steven R. Loomis via Unicode wrote:
[…]
> But, it sounds like the CLDR process was successful in this case. Thank you for contributing.

You are welcome, but thanks are due to the actual corporate contributors.

[…]
> Actually, I think the particular data item you found is relatively new. The first values entered
> for it in any language were May 18th of this year.  Were there votes for "keycap" earlier?

The "keycap" category is found as soon as in v30 (released 2016-10-05).

> Rather than a tracer finding evidence of neglect, you are at the forefront of progressing the translated data for French. Congratulations!

The neglect is on my part as I neglected to check the data history. 
Please note that I did not make accusations of neglect. Again: The historic Code Charts translators, partly still active, sulk CLDR 
because Unicode is perceived as sulking ISO/IEC 15897, so that minimal staff is actively translating CLDR for the French locale and can 
legitimately feel forsaken. I even made detailed suppositions as of how it could happen that "keycap" remained untranslated.

[…] [Unanswered questions (please refer to my other e‐mails in this thread)]

> The registry for ISO/IEC 15897 has neither data for French, nor structure that would translate the term "Characters | Category | Label | keycap". 
> So there would be nothing to merge with there.

Correct. The only data for French is an ISO/IEC 646 charset:
http://std.dkuug.dk/cultreg/registrations/number/156
As far as I can see there are available data to merge for Danish, Faroese, Finnish Greenlandic, Norwegian, and Swedish.

> So, historically, CLDR began not a part of Unicode, but as part of Li18nx under the Free Standards Group. See the bottom of the page 
> http://cldr.unicode.org/index/acknowledgments
> "The founding members of the workgroup were IBM, Sun and OpenOffice.org". 
> What we were trying to do was to provide internationalized content for Linux, and also, to resolve the then-disparity between locale data
> across platforms. Locale data was very divergent between platforms - spelling and word choice changes, etc.  Comparisons were done
> and a Common locale data repository  (with its attendant XML formats) emerged. That's the C in CLDR. Seed data came from IBM’s ICIR
> which dates many decades before 15897 (example 
> http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/13342/IBM-National-Language-Support-Reference-Manual-Volume-2/
> - 4th edition published in 1994.) 100 locales we contributed to glibc as well.

Thank you for the account and resources. The Linux Internationalization Initiative appears to have issued a last release on August 23, 2000:
https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/83
the year before ISO/IEC 15897 was lastly updated:
http://std.dkuug.dk/cultreg/registrations/chreg.htm

> Where there is opportunity for productive sync and merging with is glibc. We have had some discussions, but more needs to be
> done- especially a lot of tooling work. Currently many bug reports are duplicated between glibc and cldr, a sort of manual synchronization.
> Help wanted here. 

Noted. For my part, sadly for C libraries I’m unlikely to be of any help.

Marcel