Fwd: Re: Proposal to improve support for ISO 3166 Country Codes in KLocale

[Rolf Eike Beer]

Resending this as I accidentially stripped the CC list.

----------  Weitergeleitete Nachricht  ----------

Betreff: Re: Proposal to improve support for ISO 3166 Country Codes in KLocale
Datum: Dienstag, 9. Februar 2010, 09:47:09
Von: Rolf Eike Beer <kde at opensource.sf-tec.de>
An:  "KDE i18n-doc" <kde-i18n-doc at kde.org>

Am Donnerstag, 4. Februar 2010 schrieb John Layt:
> [cc: to Marble, Edu, and i18n lists for comment, please try reply to k-c-d
> to keep thread in one place]
> 
> I would like to propose improving our support for the ISO 3166 Country Code
> standard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166) in two areas.
> 
> Firstly, some apps need to translate between the alpha 2, alpha 3 and
> numeric forms of the code, e.g. the EXIF standard uses alpha 3 codes, but
> KDE uses alpha 2 for example when fetching the translated country name to
> display.
> 
> Secondly, some libraries and apps would like to use the subdivision codes
> as provided by ISO 3166-2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2), e.g.
> KHolidays wants to know a users state or province to know which regional
> holidays to display.  Other users could be Marble, KGeography, etc.
> 
> While it would be easy to add the alpha 3 code to each locale's .desktop
> file, this would be inefficient on a one-off look-up (reading 100 files
> each time on average), so I was initially thinking a static table loaded
> from a file would work better.
> 
> The subdivisions, however, with some 4200 codes currently defined, could
> quickly become a support and translation nightmare.
> 
> Fortunately, there exists the iso-codes project (http://pkg-
> isocodes.alioth.debian.org/) which provides the ISO 639 Language Codes, ISO
> 3166 Country Codes, ISO 4217 Currency Codes, and ISO 15924 Script Codes in
> XML files, along with translations into some 38 languages.

iso-codes also provides currency names as of ISO 4217. Given the amount of 
untranslated strings that we had to fight for this release that were 
introduced by libunitconverter and all the currency names I would love to see 
this.

Given the poor state of a bunch of their translation I think we should first 
bug KDE translators to translate those stuff before pulling it in. And for 
that we need a simple way to upstream our translations.

Eike

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