Re: [Joseph Mingrone] Re: We would like to be an agent for FreeBSD in China

From: Guangyuan Yang <ygy_at_freebsd.org>
Date: Fri, 03 Dec 2021 19:15:46 UTC
Joseph Mingrone <jrm@freebsd.org> 于2021年12月3日周五 13:23写道:
>
> Hi delphij@ and ygy@,
>
> I suspect you may have more knowledge on this subject than me.  If there
> is any chance of hosting a mirror site in mainland China, it would be
> great for Chinese users and the Project.  I'm told there are big
> hurdles, but it may be possible.  What do you think?  Are you able to
> help?

Thanks Joe for looping me in - I CC'ed delphij@ (since the last CC was
not successful) and lwhsu@ (for further mirror-related questions).

> On Fri, 2021-12-03 at 19:07, kaik haven <gubai2559@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > We call ourselves the "FreeBSD Chinese Community", a team from China, and
> > we have been working to get more people to use FreeBSD in China. Of course,
> > we have encountered a lot of problems, such as: Chinese users always have
> > trouble installing FreeBSD on their computers, because there is no official
> > mirror site, and the closest one to mainland China is in Taiwan, and we
> > have no way to connect to an official mirror site for policy reasons;

> > there is no unified mainland China user group or foundation to
> > help mainland FreeBSD users. We have contacted you and the University of
> > Science and Technology of China LUG has offered to mirror FreeBSD and be
> > one of the official mirror sites, but in the end, no one cared and it went
> > away.

I understand the hassle of trying to connect to an official mirror in
mainland China. As far as I know, there are a couple of usable
unofficial mirrors there (not an advice), including:

- https://mirrors.ustc.edu.cn/
- https://mirrors.nju.edu.cn/

We also had extensive discussions about having official mirrors in
mainland China in the past, however, we have concluded that it is
currently not possible due to regulatory reasons - if anything
changes, we'd be happy to revisit this. For the maintainers of
unofficial mirrors, please feel free to let clusteradm@ know (and CC
me) if there is anything we can do to help improve your experience.

> > there is no official documentation in Chinese for users to review, and the
> > website for the official Chinese documentation translation project is There
> > is no official Chinese documentation available to users, and the official
> > Chinese documentation translation project website is inaccessible and
> > unmanaged

This is not true. As jrm@ pointed out, we have an official website and
document translation project in Simplified Chinese. Some of the
content is outdated, but the project is still active and can be
accessed in mainland China:

- https://www.freebsd.org/zh-cn/
- https://docs.freebsd.org/zh-cn/books/handbook/

Anyone interested in contributing can simply register and start
translating on the following page:

- https://translate-dev.freebsd.org/

You can contact me for any further questions related to document
translation, I am happy to provide any assistance for current and
future contributors.

Best,
-- 
Guangyuan Yang
ygy@FreeBSD.org