[Freeciv-Dev] (PR#14721) City Name Aliases

["Benedict Adamson" <badamson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=14721 >

At Daniel's suggestion, I'm creating a separate ticket for my patch to 
add city name aliases. The previous ticket used for the patch was PR#14343.

Daniel Markstedt wrote:
...
> You implementation has a weakness: It does not support the defining of 
> alternative names for cities not actually on a nation's city list.
...

I deliberately wanted to keep the initial version simple; I prefer an 
incremental approach, but until its actually committed, I guess I can 
just keep producing new versions. Such alternative names are useful only 
for renaming cities on conquest; a feature not in the current version of 
the patch, but which I would have to implement first.

Which would be preferred? One large patch with all the features 
(aliases, renaming and foreign names) or a sequence of patches?

I previously proposed this:
> * A city name in a nation's city list may be marked as being the name of 
> a foreign city. The server will never select such names for new cities 
> created by that nation. However, the server will consider those aliases 
> for renaming on conquest. A city name is marked as being a foreign name 
> by using the word 'foreign' like a terrain designation.

On further consideration, a 'foreign' label is not so good, because we 
also require a canonical name for entries that have a 'foreign' label; 
the format would be better if the syntax enforced this. That can be done 
by using a character other than '=' to indicate aliases of foreign 
cities, '*' for example (commonly used in historical linguistics for an 
unattested word). Then, using your examples, we could have the following:

"Keijo (*Seoul)" ; in Japanese city list
"Donggyeong (*Tokyo)" ; in the Korean city list
"Miklagård (*Istanbul)' ; in the Viking city list