Re: Location list proposal [was: why must Debian call Taiwan a "Province of China"?]
Anthony Johnson <pc_1500@yahoo.com> writes:
> As pointed out clearly in the "common xml locale
> repository" paper[1] from ICU, Page 3:
>
> "Language and Territory codes follow ISO-639 and
> ISO-3166 respectively".
[stuff deleted]
> Look, the standard is *international* and should be
> followed.
>
> btw: to people from China Taiwan who start the
> needless flame war here: check the source of locale
> data from ICU[2], why won't you go against IBM, but
> against Debian here? Just because you saw it and don't
> like it?
As a Unix programmer, who just finished reading Eric Raymond, "The Art
of Unix Programming," I agree that we should conform to standards, for
technical issues. But for the name of a location, it is certainly not
technical issue. I'll try to be neutral in this post, even I come from
Taiwan.
Taiwan is not a member of ISO; this is not because we don't want to
participate, it's because strong political pressure from China. So we
don't have a chance to speak up in the *international*
organization. That's why we ask Debian to reconsider the decision to
conform to the ISO-3166 standard.
People in China don't like to call Taiwan a country. Especially, when
they confront with this issue, they tend to be irrational.
People in Taiwan don't like to be called "province of China" because
it's not the fact. Of course, we don't want to irritate people in
China. So we accept to be called "Taiwan," a more neutral name.
I suggest that we use "Choose country/location/area" on the menu, and
provide an item "Taiwan." In this way, people can freely read in any
combination of "country/location/area" and "Taiwan." It's more
flexible and neutral. We don't want to fight against anybody in the
open source community; we just want to be respected. Any decision made
by Debian should be respected, but we also should speak up for us if
we have chance.
--
Jiun-jie Huang, aka Albert E-mail: jjhuang AT cm.nctu.edu.tw
黃俊傑
Department of Computer Science
National Tsing Hua University MIME/ASCII/PDF/PostScript are welcome!
HsinChu, Taiwan NO MS WORD DOC FILE, PLEASE!
Reply to: