[Mageia-discuss] IRC community channels - need a ruling from the board

[Oliver Burger]

Marc Paré <marc at marcpare.com> schrieb am 2010-10-04
> The ISO country codes were devised for such situations. The recognized
> German language code is now "ger" as seen by the ISO Country code
> charts. It used to be "de", however, "ger" is more representative of the
> spoken language and not of the country code and is now accepted as the
> language code for the german language.

Ok, there is an ISO standard telling me, that GER is more representative then 
DE. I understand that and I can't do anything about it.
But why should that be the case? If I were somebody not speaking German (or 
"deutsch" as the German speaking people call it) I would search for GER, but 
if I were speaking German I wouldn't because I don't call my language German, 
I call it "deutsch".
No matter where you look, the German localization is called "de", not "ger". 
Just go to KDE, GNOME or any big distro.
OO.o even calls the language packs "de_DE", "de_AT" and "de_CH". No GER again.
I'm not an Austrian and not a Swiss, but I think, they won't have any problem 
with using "de" as code for the German language, not just the German national 
state.
E.g. we do have quite some austrian and swiss members at mandrivauser.de who 
did never see any reason for founding mandrivauser.at or mandrivauser.ch. 
Because it would mean a lot of work to be done in triplets.

I do think, that standardization commitees like the ISO (which in fact is an 
US american organization, just widely acknowledged) should go out andf look at 
reality before they decide on what is the standard.
Of course, I am young enough to lear to change from de to ger, but the 
question is: does it make any sense at all?

Oliver