Hi, Alex asked me to way in here as the maintainer of pycountry.
I would always recommend a solution that allows people to customize their usage based on their views and needs. In PyCountry you can, relatively easily, extend or modify the database in the packages at runtime of your software to include variations on top of the official databases. pycountry had previous incidents of people forking it based on their needs/views which missed the point completely. See [1] for a rather entertaining example. My personal recommendation would be to maybe even completely get rid of the common names and let that be a problem of a specific user. My view is that this is an _exact_ (as humanly possible) implementation of the ISO databases and stay away from further political issues. I’m not involved with Debian at all, so maybe there is a political layer that Debian does want to take a stance on, then that would be their prerogative. A technical solution for that could be to provide a separate package for “biased” data to complement the “pure” iso database. Cheers and hugs, Christian [1] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/correct_pycountry/0.12.2 On Wed, 14 Jun 2017 14:07:45 -0600 Alex Henrie <alexhenri...@gmail.com> wrote: > Christian and Tobias: Thanks to both of you for your replies. > > 2017-06-13 22:50 GMT-06:00 Christian PERRIER <bubu...@debian.org>: > > I introduced "common names" in order to solve TWO specific cases that > > had very strong political implications, *including in the said > > countries themselves : Taiwan and Macedonia. These names are the way > > these countries and their respective governing bodies want them to be > > called. However, international bodies (namely the UNO and the ISO-3166 > > standard agency), have chosen to follow advices and influences from > > *outside* the said countries, to include names ("Taiwan, Republic of > > China" and "Former Yougoslavian Republic of Macedonia") that are NOT > > ACCEPTED inside the countries. > > If the goal is to depoliticize Taiwan then it would help to add common > names for other countries as well. That way, Taiwan won't be singled > out as the only country to have an unofficial name. Making it easier > to compute on all countries' commonly used names would just be a happy > side effect. > > Liebe Grüße, Christian Theune -- Christian Theune · c...@flyingcircus.io · +49 345 219401 0 Flying Circus Internet Operations GmbH · http://flyingcircus.io Forsterstraße 29 · 06112 Halle (Saale) · Deutschland HR Stendal HRB 21169 · Geschäftsführer: Christian. Theune, Christian. Zagrodnick
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