-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Christian Perrier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkB9vZAACgkQqq7AEt0PYmiFMwCdG698jNS7z2rhxujFTMMp9s/a JpoAoJTnQ301n9Zbrdc8LDiFIATDyaKp =nx0q -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
