Everything's politics, as this shows. You can't avoid it.

I don't agree. If I create a repo where a country list and their corresponding flags are needed for the application, I'll grab that from somewhere (maybe Wikipedia, or another repo?). If someone else comes in and says "hey that's not a country", that's where the politics is, not in my need for a country list.

Where are you getting your list of countries from?

I was annoyed when composer (PHP package manager) output, along with a lot of other stuff got clogged by colorful "Stand with Ukraine" messages (which, ironically, turns out to be orange in my terminal, instead of yellow). Now all this seems pretty mundane, though. Software is written by humans, after all, so all worst human behaviors will be projected onto it as well.

What kind of person do you have to be, to think "I stand with Ukraine" message is "worst human behavior"?

Country flags are inherently political. They are a symbol of a political entity. If you don't want politics in "git" (or in code in general), then don't put it in.

That said, this particular issue should not have been turned into a state-politics issue. The element in question seems to be a language selection rather than a country selection, so the very first argument ("TaiWan flag should not be placed along with other REAL country flags") is a bad one regardless of how you think of Taiwan's political status.

I also agree with another commenter that said the maintainer dealt with this really well. Kudos to them!

Not really. I mean, this obviously depends on what you consider political, but as the maintainer correctly noted a flag doesn't have to represent a country. I can have my own flag. Depending on my prominence, my flag can be showcased in Wikipedia and you can even include it into your CSS library. People may even recognize it. If it makes me a "political entity" is an open question, however.

But filing tickets demanding to remove something from a CSS library because it "isn't a real country" definitely is a political statement. Which, for me, is always very unwelcome, but quite mundane at this point.

As the parent commenter said, it is inherently political.

If a Quebec separatist wrote some software, they might give Quebec a flag of its own like a country in the software. (I've seen it before!) Political statement. Or they could leave it out and use the Canadian flag -- also a political statement in the eyes of some. There's no way out of it, really.

It would be sad and petty if a GitHub PR spam war started over the flag in question. But politics is often sad and petty.

> Country flags are inherently political

Not people focused on the purpose of the repo.

Clearly was for the person submitting the PR?

As someone who has worked a lot with geo data and delivered them to end users, this here is just the tip of the iceberg.

Languages are already quite political, but maps and all their borders and city names are much worse. Some borders are disputed and both sides have made the distribution of maps with the "wrong" borders illegal, the Catalans hate to see the Spanish names of their towns used in the Spanish version of the website, sometimes borders are moving fast and the inhabitants of newly founded countries usually feel really strong about the correct representation on every single map in the world, and even if you use maps without borders or labels at all, it could be illegal to plot some kind of harmless data on it, like wind speeds that have not been published by the country's authorities.

Stuff like this inevitably floods the inboxes of a lot of companies, so I'm not surprised at all to see it happen on GitHub.

China regularly uses the Great Cannon (the offensive DDoS capabilities of the Great Firewall) against GitHub because it hosts free VPN software mainland Chinese can use to work around censorship. So whether they want it or not, they are involved already.