On 5/22/21 11:17 AM, Tim Parenti wrote:
In particular, the latter group (things like America/La_Paz -> Etc/GMT+4) seems to encourage things or behaviors which historically cause confusion, especially for novices:
We could avoid these problems by merging Etc/GMT+4 into America/La_Paz rather than vice versa. That would be easy to arrange, and would result in the same number of timezones. A downside would be that TZ='Etc/GMT+4' would no longer be equivalent to TZ='<-04>4' for pre-1970 timestamps, but those timestamps are out of scope anyway.
if any of the resulting pairings are particularly far-flung (I haven't checked thoroughly yet)
Some are far-flung but that should be OK. It shouldn't matter, for example, that Asia/Dubai and Asia/Reunion are aliases even though Dubai and Réunion are separated by 5000 km of ocean and disparate political systems. Users of those aliases shouldn't care, any more than users of Europe/Copenhagen and Europe/Berlin should care.