April 18, 2013
6:01 p.m.
On Thu, Apr 18, 2013, at 13:58, Guy Harris wrote:
Presumably by "understand" you mean "have a file with the appropriate pathname"; I don't think software should "understand" the identifiers except by using them to construct pathnames of Olson-database files to load - it shouldn't "know" the pathname syntax or "know" what particular values of particular components of the pathname "mean".
The timezone identifier is used as a key in other databases, such as CLDR (whose maintainers have, IIRC, declined to recognize any changes made to the identifiers used for existing timezones)