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Re: why must Debian call Taiwan a "Province of China"?

Miles Bader wrote:

claus@xn--frber-gra.muc.de (Claus Färber) writes:
BTW, there are a lot of other names from ISO 3166 that IMO should be changed for everyday use:
Short name contains unnecessary parts from the full official name (probably for political hyper-correctness): 

IRAN, ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF;IR                => IRAN
LAO PEOPLE'S DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC;LA         => LAOS
MICRONESIA, FEDERATED STATES OF;FM          => MICRONESIA
MOLDOVA, REPUBLIC OF;MD                     => MOLDOVA
TANZANIA, UNITED REPUBLIC OF;TZ             => TANZANIA



In all of these cases, a consistent form is followed:  The part after the
comma forms a proper prefix of the `common' name, and when used gives you
the country's self-declared official name; taking the part before the comma
gives you the common name[1].  This makes automatic processing easy.  Removing
the part after the comma from the database for the above countries yields
no benefit.
also note that this is only used if the proper name is not the first word in formal name (e.g. there's syrian arab republic, russian federation but tanzania, united republic of), so if the part after comma is removed then _all_ the parts related to form of government etc. shoul be removed, right? why should united republic of tanzania become tanzania but russian federation stay russian federation? I mean everybody knows what russia means.
and while we're at it - netherlands is really holland. and... it's quite silly argument... 



It's only Taiwan that's weird, because (1) the resulting long name isn't
a real name at all, but the rather awkward construct:  "Province of
China Taiwan" and obviously (2) that isn't the self-declared name of the
country[2].
there's also SLOVAKIA (Slovak republic). so we have two names. so what. do we have to give up one?
A different short name is more common (again, the UN name was probably chosen for political correctness): 

KOREA, DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF;KP   => KOREA, NORTH
KOREA, REPUBLIC OF;KR                       => KOREA, SOUTH



These names are[3] those chosen by the respective countries -- _that_ is
something I thing ought to be respected (so if Taiwan were to suddenly
start calling itself [in English] `Province of China Taiwan', well then
the argument is over I guess :-).

[1] The exceptions seem to be Laos, where the most common english name used
    isn't present, and perhaps North/South Korea, as discussed above.

[2] Which as far as I can figure is "Republic of China (Taiwan)"; I'm not
    sure how one would actually fit this into the comma-separated-prefix
    scheme... :-/
changing the names of countries is in some cases making a political statement, in other cases it's just rude (why not call the country whatever it wants to be called)
btw funny that there' united states, not united states of america (I thought the latter is the official name) 

	erik
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