On May 22, 9:14pm, kre@munnari.OZ.AU (Robert Elz) wrote: -- Subject: Re: [tz] Dropping iso3166.tab | So, I have a counter proposal to that made by Paul Eggert - with similar | objectives, just achieved in a slightly different way. | | Paul suggested 3 operations. The first, removing iso3166.tab is a no-brainer | we can easily do that - anyone who wants a copy can get it from other sources. | | For zone.tab (assuming that the other solution, of simply moving it, and | tzselect, to some other project isn't adopted) rather than making column 1 | be a comment, define it to be a region, expressly not a country, and explicitly | not using (however similar they may seem) ISO3166 2 letter identifiers. | Instead define it as simply being a tz project specific identifier used to | group related zones that apply within some tzdata defined region together. | | Of course, in practice, most of the time we'll keep using identifiers, that, | by pure accident of course, happen to be the same as the 3166 2 letter | identifier for the country that has rather similar boundaries to our | region, without ever, of course, implying they are the same, and without | ever claimimng that some city belongs to a particular country - that is none | of our business, nor do we care one way or the other. | | Step 3 of Paul's plan I'd avoid for now - that is, merging zones that could | be merged. Not because it is the wrong thing to do, but because it is a | whole bunch of work for no immediate gain. All the old zones would still | exist (or seem to exist) in the output from zic (the stuff that people | actually see) because of the "backward" entries we would need to create. | Instead, I'd simply allow zones to be merged if at some future time doing | so will make life easier - so if in the future, something changes that would | need updates to a whole bunch of identical zones, it might at that time be | easier to merge them into one (and add backward links) simply because that's | easier to do than the same edit several times. FWIW, I am perfectly happy with this plan. christos