Re: 2 little politically charged characters

[Danilo Segan <dsegan gmx net>]

Hi Sergey,

понедељак, 01. септембар 2003. 01:19:03 CEST — Sergey V. Oudaltsov  
написа:
> Hi all
>
> Finally, I found the approach to the layout indication which I see as
> the best one:
>
> GSwitchIt will use three-letter country code (ISO 3166) wherever
> possible. The codes are in first-uppercase format except for
> abbrevations USA, GBr, LAm. Though, some layouts do not correspond
> directly to some country (or have obsolete ISO codes like  
> Yugoslavia).

If you're subscribed to the i18n list at xfree86.org, you might have  
noticed that quite similar suggestion was crafted by Frank Murphy.

I've given suggestions much along the same lines as yours, except that  
I went for uppercase ISO 3166 two-letter country codes for location- 
based layouts (like national standards), and lower-case ISO 639 two- 
letter or three-letter language codes for "linguistic" keymaps.

Frank actually went for a similar, but slightly different approach:  
three-letter language codes, and two-letter country codes (all  
lowercase, so it could work on filesystems which don't differentiate a  
case).

> Some of them are related to the languages which have some three- 
> letter codes in ISO 639-2, otherwise they are handled specially  
> (sure, without collisions with any existing TLC):

You may try to look at the i18n xfree86 org archives -- this was  
discussed fairly recently (August 13--25).

I believe it would be wise to follow the same pattern if anyhow  
possible.


Btw, the country code for "Yugoslavia" (actually, since February it's  
"Serbia and Montenegro") is "CS" and "SCG" since July 24, so you could  
perhaps use that where appropriate. Also, I'm about to send an updated  
Serbian keymap to Xfree86 -- so, if you ship separate keymaps, perhaps  
I can work on improving a Serbian one.

Cheers,
Danilo