Peter Constable wrote: >> I doubt it's necessary to worry about erasing the >> political distinction between Romanian and Moldavian. > > OK. For managing language resources, what ID should one use?
Well, you do as usual, you do both, just to be sure. What is the problem? You already have a plethora of ID, many of them are overload; I am currently in Spain, and I encounter too many messages which say (a bit paraphrased): "you are running a session in Spanish; the current application does not support Spanish; would you like to use Spanish instead?" (of course, this is created by the difference between traditional and modern sort; still it is funny). Before that, I was amazed by the very existence of the locale "French for Monaco"... I am sure nobody will switch to this locale, since it will probably mean disappearition of a good number of French messages, particularly in the "i15d apps" (only enabled for Belgium, Canada, France, and Switzerland)! Do not tell me you worry about the size of the resulting package: when you are at handling Romanian for Moldova specifically, you have already (based of GNP) about a hundred locales... Even if it is something very specialized (say, a pan-Romance thesaurus), this will mean just one additional locale into an already long list. And there is no additional work to handle the fact there is two locales, since they are identical, so testing one or the other should give identical results. What is really additional work, and it is work for you (the project manager) is to ensure that both locales do not diverge. With may imply proeminent comments in the sources (but you have to make sure this does not show outside) or the standards, or special coherency ruling while building. Furthermore, you (and your company) do not want to play politics, do you? And entering (either way, i.e. dropping Moldavian or dropping ro_MD) the debate is always giving some heated extremists a way to bash your company; giving both option is much more neutral (OK, doing nothing is better on this respect; but does not satisfy :-( ). Note that this does not apply only to Microsoft (of course, MS is much more of a target of this kind). By the way, the users may not be a good source for informations on such a question. Basic users, the ones which you really want to know the advices, have no preoccupation about IDs: once they have Romanian text and UI, they are very happy; if that means switching the country to Rumania, well they will do that; if there is an additional entry for Moldavian and/or Moldova, and the result is the same, well that is fine too (and note that a number will not even notice this); what is not good is when neither the entry for Moldovian, nor the entry for Romanian in Moldova, shows the same level of support as Romanian in Rumania: in such a case, they switch back in a hurry to Rumania (and yes, I have experienced that, and more than once). The ones which do have an eye about the ID are computer people (like the one from gov' agency that set up, wrongly, the code at the home page ;-)), which for their proper use are using English! The typical people of "Do what I say, not what I do" kind. Which is why I said this can easily drift into religious wars. As you have already noticed in this thread, the issue is debatable, and everybody has an idea this about; so I believe the responsive behaviour for the IT technicians should be to stay neutral. Hope this helps, Antoine
