On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 11:27 PM, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
On 05/20/13 13:59, Garrett Wollman wrote:
FreeBSD does this (and always has); you can look at it if you want.
I have been thinking of proposing to drop iso3166.tab from the tz distribution, and to drop all uses of country codes. This would help simplify maintenance, as it would mean that the database would be unaffected by political issues such as whether Kosovo is a country, what country Jerusalem is in, what country Taipei is in, etc. The idea is to simplify the database to help us focus on our charter (namely, civil time) and to be less distracted by political issues that do not affect the clocks.
As part of this change, the first column of zone.tab would change from its current role (a country code) to be just a comment.
The Python timezone library (pytz, currently standalone but accepted to be included into Python core) exposes a mapping of iso3166 country code to timezones in use in that region. This is currently pulled from zone.tab. Removing this information from zone.tab without an alternative would break an unknown number of Python applications. If zone.tab has political problems, could we maintain this information in another format? I don't see that a list of which timezones are in use in a region is at all political - Asia/Taiwan for instance could happily be listed both for .tw and .cn. This would satisfy the pytz use cases, as well as other systems needing a cheap mechanism for narrowing down timezone selection choices. -- Stuart Bishop <stuart@stuartbishop.net> http://www.stuartbishop.net/