Bug#384510: localechooser: Please use official country names

[Jens Seidel <jensseidel@users.sf.net>]

On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 09:48:43AM +0200, Christian Perrier wrote:
> Quoting Jens Seidel (jensseidel@users.sf.net):
> > I wonder why you do not use the official country names. So I found for
> > example "Macedonia, Republic of" whereas the offical name (according to
> > comments in the PO file) is "The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia".
> 
> Please refer to former threads about the names of Taiwan and
> Macedonia. I am *not* ready to handle more of these discussions.
> 
> The discussion about the name of Macedonia happened in second half of
> 2004 in -boot, IIRC.

Found it:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-greek/2004/09/msg00012.html

> For Macedonia, the compromise is accepted by most of the two
> "parties", namely the Greek and Macedonian users.
> 
> So, we will definitely *not* fix this.
> 
> Don't try to convince me as my own opinion was using the official
> names.
> 
> Anyway, the issue does not even pertain to localechooser but rather
> iso-codes which provides the relevant information.

OK, so let's not use the official name. You should have noticed that
I'm not worried about political issues but about an inconsistent naming
scheme.

The problem I originally have seen in the German translation is 
Mazedonien, Republik
and
Moldawien (Republik)

You probably agree that this is inconsistent and should be avoided. I
provided already a patch for this and assumed that using official names
would avoid this problem at all (by not using the Republic suffix).

Now I notice that only a very small subset of all the different naming
conventions (XXX, Republic of; Republic of XXX; XXX Republic) is used in
Debian Installer, namely XXX, Republic of. This is OK since it grants a
proper ordering by the country und the suffix ", Republic of" is only
used when necessary.

Tobias (the co-maintainer and German translator of iso-codes) offered to
change s/Macedonia, Republic of/Republic of Macedonia/ and the same for
Moldova and Korea to make this more consistent inside iso-codes. Tobias,
please don't do this, I noticed that the current usage is (at least in
the Debian Installer) consistent.
I'm sorry about this trouble, but as I told Tobias already in a private
mail the very large collection of country names in different naming
conventions is very confusing (at least for me :-))

Jens