Standard Compliance in Country Names
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Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org> wrote:
> As Martin wrote privately to me about this issue (I guess I could
> quote him completely about this but I didn't receive his explicit
> permission for that), we are not in the business of deciding which
> name is correct. Following official standards is our only possibility
> and, as he wrote, "If people disagree with the standard, they should
> take it up with the standards body", which I perfectly agree with.
This message explains my take on the issue, with special emphasis on the
topic of standard compliance. It is possible that we will never reach
complete agreement, given that there had been so many failed attempts so
far, and eventually you will have to do whatever you have to do to get
d-i out of the door. I accept that possibility. But before we get
there, I would like to have my viewpoint on file, if only to give you
some alternative arguments to contemplate.
First of all I would like to express my gratitude to your work on this
issue and on d-i in general. It is clear to me that your original
proposal is not politically motivated, and standard compliance is what
you really care about. It is also clear that you have worked as hard as
anyone else to find a reasonable compromise between the extremes that
will satisfy as many people as possible. Regardless of the outcome of
this incident, I appreciate the efforts you have made.
Let's go back to issue of standard compliance. You quote ISO 3166 as
the "official" standard on country names and intend to follow it to the
letter. This is a decision I have problems with: ISO 3166 should not be
treated as an a priori authoritative source of country names in the same
sense that IANA is an authority on internet IP addresses. The
distinction should be clear: ISO does not assign names to countries in
the way IANA assigns IP addresses to RIRs. The only designations
created by ISO are the alpha-2 two-character code elements, and I don't
think anyone has problems with that.
The ISO 3166-1 country names come from United Nations sources, and ISO
merely compiled them into a list. The curious fact that names in the
list usually agree with the official position of the respective
countries suggest that ISO had done a reasonable job in keeping this
list accurate, but this does not make ISO 3166-1 either authoritative or
infallible. The authoritative sources for such data are the governments
of the respective countries. You are right that Debian is in no
position to change standards -- and we shouldn't. However when strong
evidence suggests that there are errors or otherwise inaccuracies in
non-authoritative standards -- in our case the standard contradicts with
the authoritative source -- we should not feel obliged to repeat them
just to be standard compliant.
Now let's switch to another perspective.
Even the existence of official international standard on a topic does
not mean Debian must follow it at all costs. We do not let DVD-Video
regional playback control requirement stop us from shipping DVD players
that allow users to exercise their fair-use rights. And we never really
cared about the Red Book CD-Audio copy restriction mechanisms. Debian
does not exist to follow standards, but instead Debian exists to serve
our users. In most cases the best way to serve our users is to follow
the standards, but that may not always be the case. As I have argued in
a separate post in this thread at -devel, calling Taiwan a "Province of
China" is a disservice to our users in Taiwan without any benefit to our
project and our goals. The proposed technical solutions are ingenious,
but our users had voiced the sentiment that it amounts to talking in our
back instead to our face. Does the cost of standard compliance really
worth it? I think this point should also be taken into consideration
when we judge the merits of proposed solutions.
Based on the combination of the two viewpoints presented above, I
maintain that following ISO 3166-1 with "Taiwan, Province of China"
changed to "Taiwan" is the best way to resolve this issue. Yes, it
breaks strict conformance to ISO 3166-1, but standard compliance should
not be considered an end to itself.
Regards,
- --
Chuan-kai Lin
http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~linchuan/
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