Re: [arch-general] Country Name (ISO-3116) Issues
Devon, Thanks for your support. You're right. This is not intended to be a political debate, so I have been using a neutral word, Taiwan, rather than other more official but sensitive, less common name. It's the fact that ISO is not reflecting how most of the world see it. ISO does not have authority over the country name. ISO does not obligate to reflect how world sees things too. I'm not asking for special treatments. I'm just asking you to follow the convention created from previous experience to prevent the misunderstanding and debates. I want to point out one thing. I will be willing to bring this to the upstream project. However, if the upstream project is unwilling to make the changes and maybe suggest us to fork a new project instead. The choice of using the which plugin will fall back to the ArchLinux community. The whole debate will go through again. This is not something just my imagination. This is a real story happened in Rails(Ruby's counterparts of django) community where Rails split out country list as a separate project and people do fork to provide a better version. Dear all ArchLinux developers, please think it through again. Thanks. If possible, use Devon's suggestion. ------------------------------ *From:* "Devon Sawatzky" <s4wa7z@gmail.com> *To:* "General Discussion about Arch Linux" <arch-general@archlinux.org> *Sent:* July 2, 2012 1:26 PM *Subject:* Re: [arch-general] Country Name (ISO-3116) Issues As Gaetan pointed out, it is not the job of Linux distribution maintainers to decide country names. But it seems to me this whole issue is not really about deciding what to name a country as that decision has already been made by many. The fact is simply that the data being used does not accurately reflect the world as most see it today. If this is not the case and this is in fact a political debate, then I am wrong, but it appears to me this is a technical debate about whether it is the responsibility of Arch, or someone else to implement the change. I would like to suggest that this is a fairly trivial change, so whether Arch "is supposed to" change the name is irrelevant. The fact remains that, regardless of whether they are obligated to change it or not, it is an easy thing to do that would be very positive for a lot of people. A good solution it seems would be to implement a temporary workaround and apply pressure upstream for a permanent fix using the weight of Arch's influence. Devon Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 11:41 PM, Myra Nelson wrote:
On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 7:51 PM, Andrew Hills wrote:
On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 8:47 PM, Allan McRae wrote:
I have found a solution. All mirrors in countries with disputed names are just removed from the official mirrorlist.
I believe servers south of the Mason-Dixon line should be listed under the country name "Confederate States of America". Under this new solution, I propose removing USA servers south of the Mason-Dixon line from the mirrorlist.
--Andrew Hills
A little more bikeshed.
I propose all servers not located in the Republic of Texas be removed from the mirrorlist. Oh yeah the rest of y'all call us a state now.
Myra
-- Life's fun when your sick and psychotic!
On 02/07/12 at 07:20am, Zero Cho wrote:
Thanks for your support. You're right. This is not intended to be a political debate, so I have been using a neutral word, Taiwan, rather than other more official but sensitive, less common name. It's the fact that ISO is not reflecting how most of the world see it. ISO does not have authority over the country name. ISO does not obligate to reflect how world sees things too. I'm not asking for special treatments. I'm just asking you to follow the convention created from previous experience to prevent the misunderstanding and debates.
As the ISO page clearly states, the country names are sourced from the United Nations: “The country names in ISO 3166 come from United Nations sources. New names and codes are added automatically when the United Nations publishes new names in either the Terminology Bulletin Country Names or in the Country and Region Codes for Statistical Use maintained by the United Nations Statistics Divisions.” http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/country_codes Asking Arch to modify the standard *is* a political act. The whole point of using a standard for what is an extremely fraught topic (geography and naming conventions) is to avoid these sorts of issues. If you have an alternative standard that can be used, please suggest it. (And please don't top post, it breaks the thread…) /J -- http://jasonwryan.com/ [GnuPG Key: B1BD4E40]
On Mon 02 Jul 2012 19:28 +1200, Jason Ryan wrote:
On 02/07/12 at 07:20am, Zero Cho wrote:
Thanks for your support. You're right. This is not intended to be a political debate, so I have been using a neutral word, Taiwan, rather than other more official but sensitive, less common name. It's the fact that ISO is not reflecting how most of the world see it. ISO does not have authority over the country name. ISO does not obligate to reflect how world sees things too. I'm not asking for special treatments. I'm just asking you to follow the convention created from previous experience to prevent the misunderstanding and debates.
As the ISO page clearly states, the country names are sourced from the United Nations:
“The country names in ISO 3166 come from United Nations sources. New names and codes are added automatically when the United Nations publishes new names in either the Terminology Bulletin Country Names or in the Country and Region Codes for Statistical Use maintained by the United Nations Statistics Divisions.” http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/country_codes
Asking Arch to modify the standard *is* a political act. The whole point of using a standard for what is an extremely fraught topic (geography and naming conventions) is to avoid these sorts of issues.
If you have an alternative standard that can be used, please suggest it.
An alternative has already been suggested. There's no reason we need to keep coming back to ISO/UN. I'm not sure what the issue is anymore and why this can't be fixed. This is silly. At any rate someone should write to whoever maintains django-countries and have them fix things on their end. These things could have been mentioned from the very get-go in the original bug report in discussion instead of closing the report with zero discussion. Incidentally the forum post is now closed and hidden from the public. Great work.
[2012-07-02 04:20:57 -0400] Loui Chang:
An alternative has already been suggested. There's no reason we need to keep coming back to ISO/UN. I'm not sure what the issue is anymore and why this can't be fixed. This is silly.
Exactly. Why did nobody submit a patch to ArchWeb [1] implementing the switch to this unnamed alternative? It baffles me. [1] http://projects.archlinux.org/archweb.git/
At any rate someone should write to whoever maintains django-countries and have them fix things on their end.
Yeah, someone really should. -- Gaetan
On 02/07/12 18:20, Loui Chang wrote:
On Mon 02 Jul 2012 19:28 +1200, Jason Ryan wrote:
On 02/07/12 at 07:20am, Zero Cho wrote:
Thanks for your support. You're right. This is not intended to be a political debate, so I have been using a neutral word, Taiwan, rather than other more official but sensitive, less common name. It's the fact that ISO is not reflecting how most of the world see it. ISO does not have authority over the country name. ISO does not obligate to reflect how world sees things too. I'm not asking for special treatments. I'm just asking you to follow the convention created from previous experience to prevent the misunderstanding and debates.
As the ISO page clearly states, the country names are sourced from the United Nations:
“The country names in ISO 3166 come from United Nations sources. New names and codes are added automatically when the United Nations publishes new names in either the Terminology Bulletin Country Names or in the Country and Region Codes for Statistical Use maintained by the United Nations Statistics Divisions.” http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/country_codes
Asking Arch to modify the standard *is* a political act. The whole point of using a standard for what is an extremely fraught topic (geography and naming conventions) is to avoid these sorts of issues.
If you have an alternative standard that can be used, please suggest it.
An alternative has already been suggested. There's no reason we need to keep coming back to ISO/UN. I'm not sure what the issue is anymore and why this can't be fixed. This is silly.
Arch does not patch the software it uses when we do not agree with upstream decisions. So we would require breaking one of the core Arch principles to implement any suggestions so far.
At any rate someone should write to whoever maintains django-countries and have them fix things on their end. These things could have been mentioned from the very get-go in the original bug report in discussion instead of closing the report with zero discussion.
Are you looking at the _original_ bug report. It has an actual comment explaining why it was closed.
Incidentally the forum post is now closed and hidden from the public. Great work.
As is a standard and well documented practice for all political discussion on the forums... Allan
I am surprised no one sees what can of worms this might open. There's a lot of countries whose names are contested, and sometimes the naming will cause emotional reactions by more than one side - take the small nation north of Greece, *commonly* (but not officially) known as Macedonia, or Yao Wei's example of Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela vs. Venezuela. If the Arch developers/community are willing to take there time and discuss every contested name, so be it, but I suspect it might have a negative effect on the core business of a Linux distribution. On 02/07/12 09:20, Zero Cho wrote:
Devon,
Thanks for your support. You're right. This is not intended to be a political debate, so I have been using a neutral word, Taiwan, rather than other more official but sensitive, less common name. It's the fact that ISO is not reflecting how most of the world see it. ISO does not have authority over the country name. ISO does not obligate to reflect how world seesBut things too. I'm not asking for special treatments. I'm just asking you to follow the convention created from previous experience to prevent the misunderstanding and debates.
I want to point out one thing. I will be willing to bring this to the upstream project. However, if the upstream project is unwilling to make the changes and maybe suggest us to fork a new project instead. The choice of using the which plugin will fall back to the ArchLinux community. The whole debate will go through again. This is not something just my imagination. This is a real story happened in Rails(Ruby's counterparts of django) community where Rails split out country list as a separate project and people do fork to provide a better version.
Dear all ArchLinux developers, please think it through again. Thanks. If possible, use Devon's suggestion.
------------------------------ *From:* "Devon Sawatzky" <s4wa7z@gmail.com> *To:* "General Discussion about Arch Linux" <arch-general@archlinux.org> *Sent:* July 2, 2012 1:26 PM *Subject:* Re: [arch-general] Country Name (ISO-3116) Issues
As Gaetan pointed out, it is not the job of Linux distribution maintainers to decide country names. But it seems to me this whole issue is not really about deciding what to name a country as that decision has already been made by many. The fact is simply that the data being used does not accurately reflect the world as most see it today.
If this is not the case and this is in fact a political debate, then I am wrong, but it appears to me this is a technical debate about whether it is the responsibility of Arch, or someone else to implement the change. I would like to suggest that this is a fairly trivial change, so whether Arch "is supposed to" change the name is irrelevant. The fact remains that, regardless of whether they are obligated to change it or not, it is an easy thing to do that would be very positive for a lot of people. A good solution it seems would be to implement a temporary workaround and apply pressure upstream for a permanent fix using the weight of Arch's influence.
Devon
Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 11:41 PM, Myra Nelson wrote:
On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 7:51 PM, Andrew Hills wrote:
On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 8:47 PM, Allan McRae wrote:
I have found a solution. All mirrors in countries with disputed names are just removed from the official mirrorlist.
I believe servers south of the Mason-Dixon line should be listed under the country name "Confederate States of America". Under this new solution, I propose removing USA servers south of the Mason-Dixon line from the mirrorlist.
--Andrew Hills
A little more bikeshed.
I propose all servers not located in the Republic of Texas be removed from the mirrorlist. Oh yeah the rest of y'all call us a state now.
Myra
-- Life's fun when your sick and psychotic!
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participants (6)
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Allan McRae
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anti
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Gaetan Bisson
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Jason Ryan
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Loui Chang
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Zero Cho