Avoiding Problems by Avoiding Decisions

[Adriaan de Groot]

On Fri, 14 May 2004, Christian Loose wrote:
> > On Fri, 14 May 2004, Allan Sandfeld Jensen wrote:

Wrong attribution, that was me.

> > == proposed policy text
> > We use only the short name (from the ISO-3166 code list) in order to
> > provide a better non-cluttered user interface, and only use the "long
> > name" when it's necessary in order to distinguish two countries with the
> > same "short name".
>
> AFAICS the link George provided already leads to the short country name
> list (Greece) instead of the official long names (Hellenic Republic). So
> IMHO with your proposal we wouldn't follow the standard and that would
> make it all debatable again.

Ah yes, those are the short names according to ISO. I was referring to
Antonio's terminology of "short" to mean "shortened even from the ISO
short list through a simple textual transformation" and "long" to mean
"the full ISO short name". I agree that any deviation that even vaguely
implies a value bias is debatable; arguing with a sed expression is not.
Hence, the amendment to name the Korea's according to common English usage
(hey, how many of y'all said "German Democratic Republic" when that was
relevant?) instead of the text of the standard is debatable - and should
be struck.

All this is moot, though, unless after this tedious discussion we can
actually move to commit relevant changes (if any) to CVS.