Comment 3 for bug 681872

Revision history for this message
Sense Egbert Hofstede (sense) wrote :

The Debian bug report has been marked as "Won't Fix", because the maintainers don't like to deviate from the official standard. The current naming of Greek is the ISO standard, which can be observed at <http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php>, and they do not want to change that.

"We won't change the standard. iso-codes is a package that provides a
list of names as they are in a standard.

Unless one of my comaintainers wants to add the "common name" hack we
had to introduce to deal with the Taiwan issue, I'm not keen to go
this way and play with names coming from the standard."

There are more oddities in the list. I discovered that the official name for the language with the code 'nld' is "Dutch; Flemish", even though Flemish doesn't exist as a separate language. Calling Dutch Flemish makes just as much sense as naming 'en-GB' "English; Kentish". Although adhering to an internationally accepted specification saves us work and prevents stepping on sensitive toes, we should consider whether the names used for languages are not confusing or even incorrect.