Allow other modules to alter province names and values

I think we need some committer feedback on this direction

I don't think this should be used for:

...issues in the queue along the lines 'there is a new province in country xx, please update your module' etc...

because we need the location module's provinces to remain as up to date as possible.
That said I know the issue queue review process isn't always as fast as we would like it to be so this would be useful for the interim period until patches are committed.

It would also be useful for custom cases like you mentioned.

I don't think it is the best idea to pass the whole provinces array in though as it is called per country so you only want to send that country's provinces.

Here is a version that passes a second $country parameter to use to determine the country.
Any objections to this approach over the patch in #1?

And for reference, here is an example implementation of the alter hook in case anyone wonders how to use it:

<?php
/**
 * Implementation of hook_location_provinces_alter().
 *
 * @param &$provinces
 *   An array of provinces for the given country.
 * @param $country
 *   The country code of the country that the provinces belong to.
 */
function mymodule_location_provinces_alter(&$provinces, $country) {
  if ($country == 'au') {
    // Remove a province.
    unset($provinces['ACT']);
    // Add/modify provinces.
    $provinces['NSW'] = 'Newer South Wales';
    $provinces['NEW'] = 'A New Province';
  }
}
?>

Seems reasonable to me, it is also a problem of the 7.x branch.
It's not only the updates, but the fact that anyone may need to use custom naming. For example, i use a webservice from a geo database with hierarchical continent/country/region/state/city and even districts precision, and they have their own code ids. I really think that being able to hook that information to replace the default one is a BIG improvement that would allow for a lot of important customizations with just a few line of code.

Best regards

all feature requests should be rolled against latest 7.x-3.x-dev and after commit can be backported to 6.x branch

9: location-provinces_alter-853810-9.patch queued for re-testing.

#9 works OK for me.

Previous test fail looks like was due to Google Maps service outage.

9: location-provinces_alter-853810-9.patch queued for re-testing.

Updated patch regarding new updates in the dev branch. Also added $lang_code to the cache key, because it has been lost in the previous patch.