[arch-general] Country Name (ISO-3116) Issues

[Zero Cho]

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 at gmail.com>
*To:* "General Discussion about Arch Linux" <arch-general at 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!
>