Re: why must Debian call Taiwan a "Province of China"?
(as Joey Hess already asked several times, please stop crossposting
this thread)
Quoting Julian Mehnle (lists@mehnle.net):
> But that's the point! The name is objectionable from a technical
> perspective: it's unnecessarily long and bulky. We are not writing
> "Germany (Federal Republic of)", so why write "Taiwan (Province of
> China)"? Just because some piece of paper says it?
Because a *standard* says it. When it comes to technical things, no
one ever thinks about deriving the standards because (s)he doesn't
like them. You'd better try to change the standard and I know this is
what most Debian Developers will try to do.....and, meanwhile, they
will apply it, just for keeping what we always claim to be one of Free
Software strengths : commitment to standards.
Germany is not called "Germany, Federal Republic of" because ISO did
not choose this for the *short* name of the country, in agreement with
the German representative at ISO, which is the German National
Standards Organisation.
ISO-3166-1, which is the one we use, is a list of *short*
names. ISO-3166-2 is a list of long, official country names.
However, some countries have explicitely asked ISO to use some kind of
longer name for "their" entry, even in the short list.
This is why you have "Lybian, Arab Jimahiriya", "Tanzania, Republic
of" and so on in the ISO-3166 list. And this is why the iso-codes
package has the same.....We are NOT in position to decide whether this
is Good or Bad. This is just like that.
So, there is NO ISSUE for all these countries.
There is an issue for TW. Because it is obvious that the Taiwan
country DID NOT choose themselves the name which is currently in
ISO-3166 list. This is "maybe" also an issue for MK, by the way.
Solutions have been proposed and will be implemented for avoiding this
while keeping the reference list compliant with the standard (until
the standard is changed, which is The Way to go).
Please refer to recent posts to -boot for that.
Reply to: