Standardizing icon names: flags

[Rodney Dawes]

On Wed, 2004-11-10 at 12:04 -0800, Daniel Stone wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 10, 2004 at 08:01:26PM +0100, Rob Kaper wrote:
> > On Wednesday 10 November 2004 7:08 pm, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > > There is no ISO 639 letter code for Taiwan, as far as I know. Including
> > > a letter code for Taiwan will result in some angry people. Failing to
> > > include one will result in a different set of angry people. Both these
> > > sets of angry people will be larger than the number of people that
> > > failing to include flags will make angry.
> > 
> > ISO is good enough for C and C++ and a lot of other things, so it should be 
> > good enough for other standards of ours as well. We're making desktop 
> > standards here, we're not trying to make people less angry about politics.
> 
> For the reasons Matt listed, including flags is a stupid idea which will
> only cause division.  Many other desktop projects and distributors have
> gone through this pain already and come to the same conclusion -- kick
> flags out.  For the amount of emotion (especially negative) it
> generates, it provides no value.  Whatsoever.

Why can't people understand the difference between specifying a
standard, and shipping an implementation? Why can't we just specify
a standard naming scheme, like flags/ISOCODE.EXT for flag names?
Why does it always have to be a political issue, and why do we have
to actually list all 367 countries in the list or something? 

> C is apolitical.  If someone burns K&R, who cares?  But if someone
> raises the wrong flag -- or sets fire to someone else's flag, or
> whatever -- then that's cause for military
> intervention/riots/punch-ons/whatever.  Comparing it to C is pointless
> and a waste of time.

And standards shouldn't be political issues. I don't know why people
keep trying to turn them into that. It's pointless and just creates a
bunch of useless e-mail to fill lists with, when we could just take
the simple nihilistic approach and specify enough to get a standard,
but not so much we piss off a bunch of narrow-minded people.

-- dobey