[tex-live] Serious (?) problem with Babel and language attributes

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Javier, hi Karl, hi everyone

I got a bug report here at Debian, but it is the same in the
current TL2014 status. It seems that something with the
language attributes is up-side-down:

The report states that
	\today
prints the wrong month for June in Russian. It should be
	"июнь" (cyrillic "i" at the first position)
but comes out as
	"iюнь" (latin "i" followed by cyrillic "юнь")

The input file is trivial:
\documentclass[12pt,russian]{article}
\usepackage[T2A]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\begin{document}
\today
\end{document}

(with or without the inputenc, I tried both!)


Reading a bit through russian.ldf I see that the printed version
is related to the "ancient" variant of Russian.

So I tried
...
\usepackage{babel}
\languageattribute{russian}{ancient}
...

and voila, the June comes out as expected in all cyrillic.

So it seems to me that there is something - a test - turned
around.

I am not sure whether Karl considers this a show-stopper, but
considering how core babel is that would be a good reason for me.

Please try to keep the Debian bug report in Cc, if possible.

All the best

Norbert

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PREINING, Norbert                               http://www.preining.info
JAIST, Japan                                 TeX Live & Debian Developer
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