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

[anti]

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 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!
>>
> 
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