On Sun, 2004-04-04 at 16:25, Dan Jacobson wrote:
> Why why must Debian call Taiwan a "Province of China"?
> Why can't it just stick with a neutral "Taiwan".
> Why single out a geographical name and append a political statement to it?
> Sticks out and looks kind of silly.
> Who cares what the two governments' official names for Taiwan are.
> Why thrust Debian into politics, where there was no big problem
> before? Anything more neutral than just "Taiwan"? I'm all ears.
> Oh great, poison energetic free software enthusiasts with politics.
> How am I going to explain to folks here in Taiwan that that is just a
> superficial or temporary part of Debian, or doesn't represent the view
> of all of Debian?
> Oh great, just after we moved everybody over from Redhat because of
> the flag issue.
If you look at the debian-boot thread in question, you'll see that the
reason is because of standards. The problem is that we have to use some
STANDARDIZED source of country names. In this case, ISO-3166. That's a
list of "short" country names as specified by the UN. ("short" is rather
a joke in the case of many country names in the list) According to the
UN listing, the country name of the location called Taiwan, is "Taiwan,
Province of China".
Pretty much every argument that is likely to be brought up here because
of this has ALREADY been discussed on debian-boot, so I'd suggest people
take a look at that thread first to prevent duplicate discussions.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/debian-boot-200404/msg00284.html
Note that none of the above is a statement of my personal beliefs or
opinions on the issue, but just a statement of facts that have already
been presented elsewhere. I would much rather focus on free software
than politics myself. :)
--
Alex Malinovich
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