On Wed, May 29, 2002 at 05:41:12PM +0100, Will Newton wrote: > On Wednesday 29 May 2002 5:19 pm, Steve Langasek wrote: > > But since this says 'english (American English)' rather than 'english', > > and presumably shows up in the list because the user asked to install > > iamerican and knows what that package is, there should not be a problem > > here. Just as I don't think 'english (British English)' will be > > confusing to users, or that many will find it hard to pick the one they > > want if these two are displayed side-by-side. > Calling American English "english" however makes it appear as if it is the > "default english" or "proper english" and other dialects are somehow > offshoots of that, which is clearly incorrect. Yes, it's not a technical > issue but a political one, and as such it will always be impossible to reach > a complete consensus, but these things are still important. Correctness is > something to be valued. Anal-retentive political correctness is to be valued? Humbug. Look, the only people who are even going to *see* this string are those that choose to install the iamerican package. I expect anyone who plans to make use of such a package to at least be aware that the short name by which we Americans refer to our own language is 'English'. The fact that others believe they have a better claim to the name notwithstanding, this is the name that will best serve this package's audience. This is not analogous to the question of locale aliases, where you have to decide whose locale will be referred to as 'English': these strings will *only* ever be used within debconf, so there's no need to try to disambiguate these short names. Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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