Initialize language and country tables from Perl modules

[ehuelsmann]

There are excellent Perl modules

• Locale::Language
• Locale::Country

which are kept up to date with the latest ISO standards for language and country name definition.

Instead of using these modules to populate our databases, for unknown reasons, we use a hard-coded list in Pg-database.sql. This issue is about deferring maintenance tasks to those who are best equipped to do them. In this case, the Perl team seems to be the best candidate.

[ehuelsmann]

There's one difficulty here which probably should make the language table a bit more dynamic (functional interface?) than the one we have now: the locale list is a list of 2-letter language identifiers as per ISO 639-1. Which is perfectly fine, but RFC 4646 introduces "language tags" (which are strikingly similar to locale identifiers!), where the syntax is <2-letter-language-code>-<2-letter-country-code>.

As we may not know in advance what combinations of language and country codes will be used, we probably be should not be calculating the Cartesian product in advance, but instead, using the "bare" list of languages and introduce more specific ones (such as nl-NL and nl-BE).

[ehuelsmann]

@ylavoie did your work on the languages and countries fix this probem?

[ehuelsmann]

Although not initialized from the named modules, the languages and countries tables have been factored out of the schema into (modifiable) reference data loaded on schema creation. Additionally, dynamic UIs have been created to manage these lists; translation is being done based on the data from Locale::* modules.