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

[Allan McRae]

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