List of packages including country flags

[Kevin Kofler]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> They aren't really per-country either. To be most accurate I would say are
> per-language with occasional national variants.
> 
> There are quite a few cases where the implication that a language belongs
> to a particular country (or a country has a particular 'right' language)
> is highly offensive. It's simply not right, and it's highly insensitive to
> the social realities in some parts of the world.

Then those users can just turn the darn checkbox off. Users in many other
parts of the world are expecting and asking for those flags. See e.g. bug
reports like these:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=244578
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=236332
(and several more) or forum threads like this:
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=147863

> It smacks of the sort of multi-cultural ignorance that Americans are
> widely credited with…

Kinda ironic how you're accusing me of multi-cultural ignorance while at the
same time assuming I'm American. :-/

I'm a European (Italian citizen, born and resident in Austria, went to a
French school) who speaks 4 languages fluently (German, Italian, French,
English).

I know that countries and languages don't map 1:1 and that keyboard layouts
don't map 1:1 to either. But if you look at the list of keyboard layouts,
you'll see that 78 layouts out of 83 (checked on Fedora 9) are named after
a country. I don't see how it would be inappropriate to match those up with
a flag. If that's inappropriate, then the name needs fixing too! But then
it's kinda hard to find a proper name and especially a proper 2-letter code
to show in the switcher (so I don't see how 2-letter codes are any better
than flags). (How do you fit "Germany and Austria" into 2 letters? "da"
won't cut it, that's already Denmark. Even 3 letters are insufficient for
some layouts used in multiple countries. And you can't fit more into a
systray icon.) The remaining 5 layouts (Arabic, Braille, Esperanto, Latin
America and Maori) are shown without a country flag, using just a 3-letter
abbreviation (Maori could probably use a New Zealand flag, but it currently
doesn't). I don't see how that interface is inappropriate.

As for the multi-language countries which have been cited, both Switzerland
and India have A SINGLE keyboard layout in that list (which is generated
from xkb data)! Switzerland has variants for German and French (not sure
which one the Italian speakers use) which you select AFTER you selected the
main layout in the list (and the dialog allows you to pick 2 variants and
to rename them, so if you want to switch between Swiss German and Swiss
French layouts, you can make them show up as de and fr or something of your
choice in the switcher). India has a default + 15 variants (and there too
you can pick multiple ones and rename them). So if you think selecting
layouts per country and considering the language variants variants of the
same layout is broken, complain to the xkb folks, not to KDE!

> Have a citation for that?  Specifically for a refusal to stop
> conflating keymaps and languages with national flags?

See e.g.: http://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=108491020719046&w=2 (and the
whole thread).

        Kevin Kofler