[Pkg-isocodes-devel] iso_3166_2.xml US Armed Forces states

[Alexis Darrasse]

Hello,

my reply concerns both of your messages and the <geographical_region>
element in general. It is currently used in three cases:

CU: The provinces are actually listed twice, once with
    <iso_3166_2_entry> and their ISO code and once with <region> and
    their postal code.

GB: <geographical_region> contains "official abbreviations" of county
    names, which according to statoids.com are "conventional
    abbreviations".

US: There are three postal codes relative to the US armed forces that
    were included with the states ISO codes. As they are not ISO codes I
    moved them in a <geographical_region> for the time being.

So, in all three cases these are codes coming from the postal system,
not ISO. Since the file states in its header that "This file gives a
list of all country subdivisions in the ISO 3166-2", my opinion is that
we should remove these entries. There might be however a very good
reason for keeping them that I am not aware of, so I will wait for
comments before removing them or fixing the issues you pointed.

Alexis