Avoiding Problems by Avoiding Decisions

[Don Sanders]

On Friday 14 May 2004 06:34, Allan Sandfeld Jensen wrote:
> On Thursday 13 May 2004 17:02, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> > On Thu May 13 2004 16:50, George Staikos wrote:
> > > http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-co
> > >de-lists/l is t-en1.html
> >
> > TAIWAN, PROVINCE OF CHINA 	TW
> > PALESTINIAN TERRITORY, OCCUPIED 	PS
> >
> > No, I don't think it's a good idea to change our current policy
> > in order to promote a greek political agenda.
>
> Exactly. The international standard are set by the strongest
> parties, or are just temporay comprises to make any political work
> possible. Where as features and strings in KDE are set for
> usability issues, and not for political agendas.
>
> There are several problems with using the ISO list:
> 1. In some cases it directly offensive to the people that are
> supposed to find their countries (se Waldo's two examples above).
> 2. Only recognized countries are in. In KDE we might want support
> oppresed minority groups, or just distinct regions (Catalan or
> Tibet locale?). 3. The discription strings tend to get way too
> long, when no sensible comprise have been found.
> 4. They are sometimes in contrast with common use.
>
> I admit however that such a pragmatic solution is not without
> costs, besides this rediculous discussion, there are consequences
> elsewhere. Recently the Debian maintainer Herbert Xu  left the
> Debian project, because during an equally heated discussion it was
> pointed out that some Debian packages, namely kcontrol, already
> called Taiwan: Taiwan.

I personally have many Taiwanese friends and it gives me a certain 
sense of pride to see KDE recognizing Taiwan as a country. (In the 
Country/Region and Language control panel).

On the other hand it's abundantly clear to me that maintaining this 
position eliminates KDE as an option for 1/6 of the worlds 
population. It's a position that the government of mainland China can 
never accept or condone.

> But like in the case with Niel Stevens, we can't really be
> responsible for the lack of tolerance in extremists developers.

Since the United States of America (one of Taiwan's closest allies) 
has recognized that the unification of Taiwan with mainland China is 
inevitable, even I who consider myself a supporter of the Taiwanese 
people can only consider KDE's position to have become extremist.

I believe Taiwan should continue to be recognized as an independent 
region in the Country/Region and Language control panel, but it's 
entry should be marked as "Taiwan (Province of China)" as recommended 
by the iso-3166 list.

Finally I would like to say that I personally have great faith in the 
wisdom and intelligence of the Chinese people as a whole, and believe 
that the mainland Chinese and Taiwanese governments are more than 
capable of solving there differences in a peaceful and mutually 
beneficial way in due time.

Don.