For interested parties...
Iso-codes including a "common name" for MKD being "Macedonia, Republic of" while the field for "official name" still contains "Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia" has been uploaded to the delayed/2-day queue. "Macedonia, Republic of" has been chosen over "Republic of Macedonia" in order to remain consistent with other entries which have "Republic/Kingdom/..." appearing after the name. This leads to a more natural sorting of names and will make the choice easier to our users. Replacing the former entry (FYROM) is the consequence of the discussion which can be followed on the debian-project mailing list: http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2004/09/msg00127.html This means that the package will be part of Debian "unstable" in 2 days. And it will reach the "testing" branch (thus the next stable version) in 12 days if no Release Critical bug appears. This is a NMU (non maintainer upload) made in agreement with Alastair McKinstry, the package maintainer as he hadn't time enough for taking care of this. I have worked with translators of the package, asking them to change their translations and choose what they all feel is the most appropriate. Most of them have chosen to use the equivalent, in their language, of "Macedonia, Republic of". The Greek translation has been kept as is, thus the greek equivalent of FYROM. This was a choice by Konstantinos even though his own feelings were more inclined to "Macedonia, Republic of". He justifies this by the strong reactions which would certainly occur among Greek users if he unilateraly changes his translation. I think that he made the best decision for that part. With this decision, we (package maintainers, on behalf of the Debian project) have tried to apply the less worse compromise for all Debian users, waiting for the case to be politically sorted out. The countrychooser package (the installer module responsible for prompting users about the country they live in) has been rebuilt by using these data. The consequence is the following: - Users in English language and wanting to choose MK as country (though there is no en_MK locale, this is possible), will "see" a first screen presenting them with most English-speaking countries and a "other" choice....When using "other", the next screen shows "Macedonia, Republic of" among all other countries. This is the one and only place this name appears - The same goes for all other non-English/non-Greek/Non-Macedonian languagesĀ : the name only appears on the "other" screen and the name appearing there is the one which has been judged the most appropriate by the relevant translator. - Users choosing the Greek language will never see any country choice on default installs, because the only greek locale in Debian is el_GR. So, only users doing install at "expert" priority will see a screen prompting them for a country. In this screen, the name for MK will be the greek equivalent of FYROM -Users choosing Macedonian (this translation does not exist yet so, this is a theoretical case) will never see any country choice screen for default installs and will see "Macedonia, Republic of" on expert-style installs The contents of the iso-codes package is currently no used anywhere else in Debian, as far as we know. For instance, the country names list in KDE is maintained upstream by KDE developers (for the record, it lists "Macedonia" ATM...) I hope that this decision, as a conclusion of this discussion where too much heat leaked in too much places, will be agreed by as mush users as possible. Some translators probably need to adapt their translation of the entry for MK as I haven't been able to contact them, so if they wish to change what is currently in the iso-codes package, they should contact me.