Dear Maintainer,

In the Debian Installer country selection, Turkey is listed under Asia.

The classification appears to come from the localechooser regionmap file,
where Turkey is currently defined as:

TR    Asia

However, several other transcontinental or geographically ambiguous
countries in the same region are classified under Europe, including
Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, and Cyprus.

For consistency with those existing classifications, I propose changing
Turkey's entry to:

TR    Europe

This change would affect only the region under which Turkey appears in
the country selection menu.

Hi,

Mehmet Gürevin <mehmetgurevin@gmail.com> wrote (Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:11:07 +0300):
a part of Turkey is on the European continent, and the other on the Asian.

While the Asian part is way more bigger (~95%), so I guess this led to the
result, that Turkey was assigned to Asia.
And this sounds reasonable to me.


Comments?

Holger

Hi Holger,

Thanks for your response.

I agree that Turkey is a special case geographically. A large majority of its landmass is indeed located in Asia, so I understand why it was placed there.

My concern is not primarily whether Turkey should be considered European or Asian, but rather the consistency of the grouping presented by the installer.

For example, Cyprus is listed under Europe even though it is geographically located entirely in Asia, and Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia are also grouped under Europe despite their similarly ambiguous or transcontinental status.

Given these existing classifications, Turkey appears to be treated differently from other countries in the same region.

If the intention is to group countries by physical geography, then several existing entries might deserve reconsideration. If the intention is instead to follow political, cultural, or user-expectation criteria, then placing Turkey under Europe would also be consistent with the surrounding entries.

So my suggestion is less about Turkey itself, and more about applying the same rationale consistently across all borderline cases.

Regards,
Mehmet

...then we should use a 6-continent model with Eurasia instead of Europe
and Asia.  (semi-serious)
[...]

I don't think it's possible to achieve a consistent and understandable
rule that maps each country to exactly one continent.  It seems this
might best be resolved by changing to a many-to-many mapping.

Ben.

Hello everybody,

greetings from Asia :)

Le Sun, Jul 12, 2026 at 09:52:30PM +0200, Ben Hutchings a écrit :

That is a nice solution for the long term.

In the short term, we could just refer to trusted external sources.  For
instance, the United Nations has a one-to-one mapping "for statistical
convenience".

https://unstats.un.org/unsd/methodology/m49/

Other UN organisations such as UNESCO have different mappings.  If a choice is
to be made, maybe it could be to take the one that is the easiest to parse and
follow for updates?

Have a nice day,

Charles