On 2021-09-22 9:17 AM, Eliot Lear via tz wrote:
On 22.09.21 15:09, dpatte via tz wrote:
Iso is a living international standard, and it's their mandate, not the mandate of timezone collectors to do the negotiation and diplomacy in order to arrive at and maintain the world standard.
Right. And this group has avoided their business for decades.
I agree. There should be only one 'authority' for country codes, and ISO 3166 is it as far as I know. It seems it is the mapping of the country codes to time zone names (tags) that is causing the current difficulties. It seems to me it should not be such a problem. As zone1970.tab (and zone.tab) says: # This table is intended as an aid for users, to help them select timezones # appropriate for their practical needs. It is not intended to take or # endorse any position on legal or territorial claims. It is useful for "practical needs" but cannot be relied upon in all circumstances. Tzdb can use ISO 3166 but should not alter it or fall victim to any political controversies it might imply. I would point out, however, that zone1970.tab also contains the time zone *coordinates*. This is different matter than country codes. In the work I'm doing the coordinates are important. They define the approximate default coordinates of time zones, and this is useful in a number of ways, indicating geographic distances between time zones and distinction of Northern and Southern hemispheres. I think this has significance to the 'merging' controversy. "Europe/Oslo" is not the same time zone as "Europe/Berlin". They may have been using the same rule sets since 1970 resulting in identical local YMDhms representations but they have different time zone names (tags) and distinct coordinates. Oslo is not the same city as Berlin. If time zone "Europe/Oslo" ever existed it still exists today. "Europe/Oslo" could adopt a new set of rules different from "Europe/Berlin" and its possible they might given the new elective rules being suggested by the EU. Olsen's original insight to use towns and cities to name time zones turns out to be extraordinarily useful. Whether or not "Europe/Oslo" is in Norway is entirely beside the point of local time in the "Europe/Oslo" time zone. Time zones really exist only in the time domain relative to the (special) "Etc/UTC" time zone. I'm sure most contributors to the tz list understand this, but there's a natural tendency equate a time zone with a location or place since this is where the general idea comes from to begin with. But I think tzdb must be vigilant to maintain this conceptual separation of time zone v.s. "place", especially in regard to politically named and claimed geographic boundaries such as Norway or Germany. This separation of "time" from "place" may seem inconsistent with my previous point about time zone coordinates but I don't think so. The time zone names are based on cities and the cities have approximate geographical location and this ties the time zone to a location. This is useful for some important purposes and supports the basic idea behind time zones. But it is a separate conceptual and implementation consideration from the local time zone YMDhms representation with respect to "Etc/UTC". The geographic coordinates have nothing to do with the local time because any time zone may adopt any UTC-offset (STDOFF) or DST rules they choose and this decouples the time zone's local time from the city location. I'm sure most tzdb experts recognize this distinction but it seems to have somehow been lost track of recently. I hope participants can find the way back to the cooperation that has characterized the group for so long. Thanks, -Brooks Harris