gnome.org two-letter subdomains

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

mån 2002-07-29 klockan 21.32 skrev Jordi Mallach:
> On Sat, Jul 27, 2002 at 11:37:51PM +0200, Christian Rose wrote:
> > I noticed that you mention sq.gnome.org on the site but this host is not
> > existing, nor is "sq" a valid country code. You'll probably have better
> > luck if you apply for "al.gnome.org", which uses the Albanian country
> > code. gnome.org two-letter subdomains should be assigned on country code
> > basis.
> 
> Let's bring up this debate on the list too after the IRC discussion,

Well then, but please set an appropriate on your mail.


> although I think it's a lost battle for us before starting it.
> 
> Regarding gnome.org two letter subdomains being only country codes,
> there's a problem for languages that have no "country" for them.
> 
> My interest is Catalan, which is spoken in 4 different countries, but
> non is "Catalonia", so there isn't a country code for it (there is a
> movement requesting one, though). Christian said that we should get
> integrated in es.gnome.org, but I really dislike this idea, as Catalan
> doesn't "belong" to Spain. Tbh, even Spanish shouldn't be represented by
> the Spanish country code, as we in Spain are a minority of the total
> amount of Spanish speakers in the world. The GNOME-Hispano team is just
> lucky that the Spanish lang-code is also "es", so they could use it in
> the meaning of the language, not the country. Many of the GNOME-Hispano
> people are South Americans, and if the website was full of remarks like
> "The GNOME group from Spain" they wouldn't be too happy about it.
> 
> I really think assigning two-letter subdomains just to country codes
> when most of these are issued for translation group webpages is an
> error. If there's no other way, there should be alternatives like
> xx.l10n.gnome.org (or xx.l18n.g.o, whatever) for cases where a language
> doesn't really apply to a country. Where would you put the English
> translation pages if one was needed? us, uk, au?

This really is a non-issue. Two-letter subdomains directly under
.gnome.org are and have been assigned on a country-code basis. They are
as I understand not primarily intended for translation efforts but
rather for local supporting gnome groups that wants a domain name for
local services. However, there is of course room for other uses, and in
many cases the language code and country code will overlap (as in
es.gnome.org).

But this does not change the fact that they are and have been assigned
on a country-code basis and if the scheme also should be modified to
allow two-letter language codes there would be many conflicts (for
example "ca" for Canada but also for "Catalan"). So this is probably out
of the question right away. ca.gnome.org is for Canada and nothing else.

I do like your suggestion for xx.i18n.gnome.org but this whole
discussion is maybe a bit off-topic for this list. If you have a
detailed request for a particular gnome.org domain, and the server to
use for it, you should contact gnome-sysadmin@gnome.org with the
details.


Cheers,
Christian