Re: No Flags "Policy"

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <uraeus gnome org>]

Hi,
I think a general no-flags policy is a rather silly notion. I do agree
however that using it as a keyboard/language identifier is probably not
a good solution because languages and nations are not a 1 to 1 equation.
So if someone bothers to do the coding and have a workable replacement
then I think replacing the flags where used today with something else is
a good idea. If nobody bothers to do the coding to remove them however
then I think breaking currently functionality to satisfy a newfound
unhappiness with flags is a a borked idea.

And general bans I do not support as we do not know what kind of
applications we will include in the future. There might very well be
situations where using flags are the best solution. Lets take each case
as they arise instead of making broad sweeping policies. 

Christian

On Fri, 2003-11-21 at 16:35, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> So, I get first dibs on this can of worms.
> 
> I strongly believe that we should not ship any national flags in GNOME. It
> will be a huge source of problems. Everyone's seen what happened when Red
> Hat shipped the Taiwanese flag (problems in China) and then removed it (and
> it's easy to understand why Taiwanese users complained). Let's not make the
> same mistakes upstream, and cause problems for all of our distributors.
> 
> The easy solution to these problems (because there are a lot of them) is to
> simply not ship flags at all. This is not controversial or offensive. It is
> not reactionary. It is a simple solution to a problem we can't control.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> - Jeff