Avoiding Problems by Avoiding Decisions

[Allan Sandfeld Jensen]

On Thursday 13 May 2004 17:02, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> On Thu May 13 2004 16:50, George Staikos wrote:
> > http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-code-lists/l
> >is t-en1.html
>
> TAIWAN, PROVINCE OF CHINA 	TW
> PALESTINIAN TERRITORY, OCCUPIED 	PS
>
> No, I don't think it's a good idea to change our current policy in order to
> promote a greek political agenda.
>
Exactly. The international standard are set by the strongest parties, or are 
just temporay comprises to make any political work possible. Where as 
features and strings in KDE are set for usability issues, and not for 
political agendas. 

There are several problems with using the ISO list:
1. In some cases it directly offensive to the people that are supposed to find 
their countries (se Waldo's two examples above).
2. Only recognized countries are in. In KDE we might want support oppresed 
minority groups, or just distinct regions (Catalan or Tibet locale?).
3. The discription strings tend to get way too long, when no sensible comprise 
have been found.
4. They are sometimes in contrast with common use.

I admit however that such a pragmatic solution is not without costs, besides 
this rediculous discussion, there are consequences elsewhere. Recently the 
Debian maintainer Herbert Xu  left the Debian project, because during an 
equally heated discussion it was pointed out that some Debian packages, 
namely kcontrol, already called Taiwan: Taiwan. 
But like in the case with Niel Stevens, we can't really be responsible for the 
lack of tolerance in extremists developers.

`Allan