From eggert@twinsun.com Mon Sep 24 13:53:11 2001
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2001 00:25:08 -0400 (EDT) From: <yaoz@vidar.niaaa.nih.gov>
1. City names are in old form. Now there is a standard way (pinyin) to write it and it should be used;
The tz database uses the most common spelling in ordinary English. For example, it uses "Rome", even though "Roma" is the correct Italian name. When I first added those entries, the pinyin method was not the most common spelling in English, and my impression is that "Chungking" and "Kashgar" are still quite commonly used in English, so it's not entirely clear to me that the time is right to switch to pinyin. (If I'm incorrect about this, please let me know.)
I think "Kashgar" or "Kaxgar" is still widely used but "Chungking" is not. (I was born in "Chongqing", and have never seen people spell it like "Chungking" these days, maybe I can find that spelling in historical books). It seems to me modern English dictionaries published in US have switched to pinyin already.
However, I think it's quite reasonable to support both spellings, and so I'll add aliases for the pinyin spellings in my next proposed patch.
That is better.
2. Comments are not quite right. This may due to the historic reasons. Because of these problems, when users in China are presented a form to pick a time zone, they are very confused.
How about if we make the following change for now?
CN +3114+12128 Asia/Shanghai most locations CN +4545+12641 Asia/Harbin Heilongjiang CN +2934+10635 Asia/Chungking China mountains CN +4348+08735 Asia/Urumqi Tibet & most of Xinjiang CN +3929+07559 Asia/Kashgar Eastern Turkestan
The way I submitted to you is following examples of US. That is "time - state (province)". My comments for above are: a. Urumqi is in Xinjiang so it maybe better say "Xinjiang & Tibet". b. Kashgar is also in Xinjiang and there is no such region as "Eastern Turkestan". That region is commonly call "Southern Xinjiang". It seems to me those entries exists because historically, they are in different time zones (as you specified in "asia" file). But I've seen Linux users in China wondering "Why Shanghai, Harbin, etc. are picked up but not Beijing or my city? We always refer to the standard time as 'Beijing Time' after all.".
I'm not sure about using the label "Beijing Time" for all of these locations. (Don't people say "China time" more often than "Beijing Time"?) Ideally the five entries would clearly delineate the boundaries between the five regions of China that have different time zone histories, but I don't have that information to hand right now.
On TV, radio, it is always saying "It is now 20' clock Beijing Time." I haven't heard of "China time" before. BTW, your 'asia' data file is really interesting. I've learned a lot from it. I've never realized that China has used different time zones before. That is why I often get confused when I was travelling in US at first. Now I get used to it, I maybe as well get confused again when I travels back in China. For example, I may end up have to get up at 7am in Shanghai, and get up at 11am in Xinjiang. In 'asia', you are saying before 1980, there are still 5 timezones in China. That doesn't seems to be the case to my experience. My family lived in Chongqing, Shanghai since 60s. I don't recall any time zone change. Let me do some research later. I have a Chinese Encyclopedia CD somewhere. I hope I can find more info on this topic. Thank you very much for your reply. Best regards, Yao Zhang