Avoiding Problems by Avoiding Decisions

[Brad Hards]

On Fri, 14 May 2004 5:09 pm, Adriaan de Groot wrote:
> Since creating a fair and acceptable policy ex nihilo on our own is
> probably difficult - viz. the notion of recognized government - the
> suggestion to defer to the UN isn't all  that bad. The politicing happens
> _there_, then, instead of in Bugzilla. Can we at least agree that these
> arguments don't belong there (in b.k.o)?
Certainly b.k.o is not the place to debate policy, and certainly not to try to 
create it.

I'm getting a cold, and it is adling my brain, so this might be pure 
crack-rock:

KDE, as I see it, is about the users.

What do the users (as a big collective) want in terms of country names?

I think what they want is something that they recognise. 

There will always be extremists who will be offended by something in KDE. 
Country names are probably just a bit more controversion than the spelling of 
the word colour (or color, my opinion is always reasonable :)

If some people want to see Great Britain, and some people expect to see United 
Kingdom, can we come up with a _technical_ solution that shows people both.

Now if SUSE has to patch KDE to sell their distro to her Majesties government 
and remove the words Great Britain, they can do that. In the mean time, most 
of the users can get on with reality, and we can get back to coding.

So the policy should be, if there are two or more names in common usage, we 
provide all of them in the selection.

If we need to name a file with a country, we use ISO3116 country codes.

Sorry to fuel the flame-fest, but I think we need to admit we'll never get a 
great political solution, and think about this some other way.

Brad