Re: why must Debian call Taiwan a "Province of China"?
"Stefan Tibus" <sjti@gmx.net> writes:
> > Debian shouldn't _make_ editorial comments like this, but they shouldn't
> > dumbly stand by and mirror those made by others with fewer scruples.
>
> I wouldn't say Debian _made_ that editorial comment, they used it as it
> was proposed by some standard.
I didn't say they made it, indeed I said they _shouldn't_ do such a
thing.
> If you don't like it, go against that one
Of course, but ...
> but not against Debian.
"It's someone else's fault" is a copout. Debian is not known for copping
out, it's known for doing the right thing and damn the consequences.
Think of it this way: It's a bug from upstream. The text in question
doesn't fit the format of the file, it's a lone exception added purely
for selfish political reasons by a bully. Deleting it will make the
file more self-consistent.
If a technical standard has a bug -- describes something hard or
impossible to implement, or extremely inconvenient for users -- there
may be grumbling and flamewars about it, but in many cases I would say
debian would err on the side of `reasonableness' over slavish adherence
to the standard (one possible example would be things affected by the
POSIX_ME_HARDER, er, I mean, POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable).
Is this particular part of the standard crucial for proper operation?
E.g., will someone lookup stuff in that file using the exact country
description as an index? I don't know, but I'd say it's pretty unlikely
-- much more probable is that they'll look for the country name (the
part preceding the comma), or use other fields as index to find the
country name. Humans of course can cope either way.
-Miles
--
Is it true that nothing can be known? If so how do we know this? -Woody Allen
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