Package Maintainers Flags policy

[Kevin Kofler]

Ding-Yi Chen wrote:
> There are no such "standard Chinese IM icons", IM developers can use
> whatever icons they like to distinguish their input methods.

And where do they come from and how do they make the user understand what
they're about to select?

> key layout icons can do the similar way, icons can be either designed by
> the key-layout switch developers or community.

But the icons need to be recognizable by the user! If I draw a beautiful
flower to represent, say, the German keyboard layout, how do people know
the flower corresponds to a German keyboard layout? Well, I could use an
Edelweiss which is common in Austria (which uses the same layout) and
Bavaria (part of Germany), but it's also common in Alpine regions of Italy,
in Switzerland and in a few other countries which all do not use the same
keyboard layout. That kind of regional symbols doesn't work any better than
flags. A picture of the keyboard with keys printed on it isn't going to
work either, at the size of a systray icon the letters are all condensed at
best to single pixels, you can't recognize anything at all.

2-letter layout names are the best we can have without flags, but 1. it's
text, not an icon and 2. the layout names aren't really any more neutral
than the flags (they are mostly country names, sometimes language names).

> For example, English and Australian might be somewhat disappointed that
> their flags are not in the list, while language oriented scheme does not
> have such problems.

* The United Kingdom is actually in the list.
* Language-oriented does not work. German and English are both spoken in
different countries with different keyboard layouts! While Austria and
Germany use the same layout, Switzerland uses a different one. And the UK
layout is also significantly different from the US one. Ireland also has
its own layout (and no, Irish is not the native language of most people
there, English is). The list of keyboard layouts is neither per country nor
per language.

        Kevin Kofler