Reasons for Decisions

This page documents reasons why the CLDR Technical Committee has made certain decisions. It provides a reference that can be cited, for example, when old issues resurface.

1. 2012-02-22 for CLDR 21.0.1 per #993 (reopened), restore firstDay for IE (Ireland) to be Sunday

    • Before CLDR 1.9 / ICU 4.6, IE was listed (in supplementalData.xml) as using Sunday for the first day of the week.

    • As originally filed, #993 requested a change to Monday stating that it was more common. However the CLDR TC did not find that there was enough evidence for making a change. Also, SĂ©amus Ă“ Ciardhuáin of NSAI, in a ticket comment, mentioned that although Monday is sometimes used as the firstDay in a workweek context, there are good reasons in history and law for using Sunday; in the latter case, a 1937 law defined Sunday as the firstDay, and an NSAI discussion reconfirmed this in 2004.

    • #2052 claimed that calendars in Ireland use Monday as firstDay, and that glibc follows this convention. CLDR checked some Irish transportation schedules; in 5 of 6, the firstDay was Monday. No changes were made under this ticket; they were subsumed by the changes discussed in the next bullet.

    • Per #2785 in CLDR 1.9, the behavior of Java (en_IE) and Windows/.NET were checked. Both of these used Monday, so IE was removed from the list of countries that used Sunday (thus defaulting to Monday, the default firstDay for 001 = the world).

    • Per #3500 in CLDR 2.0 there was a more comprehensive investigation of firstDay behavior across locales, comparing to Java and Windows. This confirmed Monday as firstDay for Ireland, and it was explicitly added to the Monday list.

    • However there is new recent feedback, including feedback from NSAI that firstDay should be restored to Sunday. Also, some of the transportation schedules checked under #2052 above as using Monday have changed to use Sunday, and Michael Everson has found several others that also use Sunday: Irish Rail, Aer Lingus, etc.

    • NSAI intends to lobby to have glibc, Windows, and Java use Sunday as the firstDay for Ireland.

Per CLDR discussion 2011-02-22, we will change firstDay back to Sunday for IE