UK vs GB?

[Chaz6]

As a British user of PROJ, I would prefer if the project used ISO 3166 codes (specifically, 3166-1 alpha-2) for countries. Would you accept a pull request to that effect, replacing instances of "uk" with "gb" where appropriate, or is "uk" used for a specific reason?

[rouault]

Would you accept a pull request to that effect, replacing instances of "uk" with "gb" where appropriate, or is "uk" used for a specific reason?

uk was used out of ignorance that gb was the ISO 3166 code for the United Kingdom, but it is now too late to change it as we have files using it.

[Chaz6]

I take it it would be unacceptable if I made a pull request that renamed the relevent files?

[rouault]

I take it it would be unacceptable if I made a pull request that renamed the relevent files?

You would also need to make corresponding changes in https://github.com/OSGeo/PROJ/blob/master/data/sql/grid_alternatives.sql .
We would have to let on the CDN the existing uk_ files, but there's nothing particular to do.
However, assuming this goes into PROJ-data 1.7 / PROJ 8.1, we could have a problem with folks using PROJ < 8.1 but using the updated PRO-data 1.7 package that would no longer provide the uk_ files...
@kbevers How do you feel about that ? Shouldn't we wait to have a good reason, like UK splitting apart because of angry Scots w.r.t Brexit ;-) ?

[kbevers]

It is unfortunate that the wrong abbreviation was used. We should pay better attention in the future.

Changing the names will obviously break backwards compatibility. Perhaps it would be possible to add some symlinks to the CDN and let PROJ have internal aliases that allows use of both gb and uk prefixes. It seems like a bunch of added complexity with no real gain (I am not a brit, though).

My preference is to stick a 2.0 milestone on this ticket and fix whenever we have a reason to do a revamp of this package. I am sure that will happen eventually.

[rouault]

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_3166_country_codes, the good news is that "uk" is not taken for another country (Ukraine is "UA"). And we have kind of an excuse from this note in the wikipedia page: "Although the country code top-level domain .gb is reserved for the United Kingdom, the country uses the .uk country code top-level domain instead."

[Chaz6]

Thank you for your consideration.