On Sun, 1 Jul 2012 15:49:46 -0400 Loui Chang <louipc.ist@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun 01 Jul 2012 21:23 +0200, Tom Gundersen wrote:
On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 7:28 PM, Loui Chang <louipc.ist@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun 01 Jul 2012 23:08 +0800, Zero, Chien-An Cho wrote:
Hello,
First of all, I am sorry to bring political issues to here. I have been using ArchLinux for years, deployed on many servers, though I'm not joining the community until now. The recent changes to the ArchLinux webpages (ex. Downloads, Mirror Status) is really offending Taiwanese people. I would like to bring up this issue, and
to resolve this issue.
I have posted this message on the forum: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=144315 . The moderator suggested me to post on arch-general, so here it is. :) There is also a bug tracking issue submitted by other Taiwanese user that I'm requesting for reopen here: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/30444
The following text is the same as the post on forum, except a few modification to make text smoother.
The recent changes on the download page named Taiwan as Taiwan, Province of China, which is not reflecting the truth that Taiwan is a independent country which having its own government. I think this might be caused by following the ISO-3166 country name list standard. However, I don't think ISO-3166 is a good list when it comes to the country name.
Many open source communities have encountered this problem before. Most of them understand that ISO-3166 is not really a neutral list that we all hope for, and thus made switch to a separate maintained country list. For example, FreeBSD[1], Rails[2], Debian[3]. Many big commercial entities also opt not to use "Taiwan, PRC" in their country list, like: Apple[4], IBM[5], also try Google, Facebook, Twitter, et cetra. A possible solution might be using the country name list from ICU[6].
I believed the ArchLinux is trying to expand its user-base around
world, so a neutral country name list would be the best for the benefit of all of us, ArchLinux developers and users. As a Taiwanese ArchLinux user, I'm really happy to see that user base of ArchLinux is growing in Taiwan. Some educational institutions provide mirrors site in Taiwan, Wiki localized in Traditional Chinese in the recent years. I sincerely hope this issue can be resolved as soon as possible. Let's keep the issue simple and not flaming it, thanks.
References:
[1] FreeBSD: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=138672 [2] Rails:
http://www.koziarski.net/archives/2008/9/24/countries-and-controversies/
[3] Debian: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/04/msg00798.html [4] Apple: http://www.apple.com/choose-your-country/ [5] IBM: http://www.ibm.com/planetwide/select/selector.html [6] ICU:
http://source.icu-project.org/repos/icu/icu/trunk/source/data/region/en.txtP...
other any country. But also not everyone is well educated in other countries' history (especially such fine-grained as that of Taiwan), nor does said education have highest priority.
While many people understand that Province of China may sound offensive and certainly everyone recognizes Taiwan's sovereignty, you have to keep in mind that for a vast majority of users there is a little distinction between all the names Taiwan has been given by UN/ISO/... -- those are just designations.
Therefore, taking this discussion to a public ML is educative and
it will only feed the trolls (as you can already see). If you really feel
you have to, report the issue personally to the site maintainer or the
Well... Given the action taken by some developers in this thread, I can't imagine what will happen if we take this issue to the maintainer privately. I understand there is no insult intention by everyine, but by using that word, it IS offending. I am not asking everyone to be educated about our history nor asking everyone to understand, and that is exactly the reason why I provided so many references in my post. To help people get a quick concept of what our demand is and to know how other communities and company did about this. That being said, let's continue to have a constructive conversation. :) I don't think that a country name can be easily defined by a so-called standard. A country's name should be decided by its people or, at least, the local authority. Open the Taiwan official website in English, you will see we actually called Republic of China, or a more common and neutral word, Taiwan[1]. There are many authorities data listed us as Taiwan as well, like the CIA world book[2]. We are not the only country being affected by this false standard. See the Rails reference in my original post or Yao-Wei's mail for more information. I think Yao-Wei's idea of using common names is good. [1] http://www.taiwan.gov.tw/mp.asp?mp=999 [2] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/tw.html ArchLinux is a user-centric system defined in the Arch Way, so please at least take our opinion seriously. Don't reject it on the first sight by just saying we're following a standard. Thanks. On Monday, July 2, 2012, Leonid Isaev <lisaev@umail.iu.edu> wrote: preferably the that noone here means any disrespect to citizens of Taiwan or pointless as like project
leader.
But as has been suggested maybe Arch should choose a different upstream for this kind of information. Please open your mind a little, a false standard is no standard at all.
-- Leonid Isaev GnuPG key: 0x164B5A6D Fingerprint: C0DF 20D0 C075 C3F1 E1BE 775A A7AE F6CB 164B 5A6D
-- Best Regards, Zero, Chien-An Cho