On Tue, 2019-02-26 at 14:03 -0800, Guy Harris wrote:
Actually, that's not a question of "pushing complexity away from the programmers", it's a question of "users who don't need to know the details, and whose heads would probably explode if forced to deal with the details" vs. "users who need, for technical reasons, to deal with the details".
Yes, that's a better way to put it.
People who deal with those issues and therefore have to know about tzdb regions should be clueful enough to know that the tzdb IDs are chosen not as user-friendly names and, therefore, that "but I'm in City X, not City Y!" is a complaint that should and will receive little sympathy here, as the Theory file states the rules we use to select the city, and "that's not how we pronounce the city's name" is a complaint to be addressed by getting the English-speaking community to change the name they use for the city (cf. Bombay -> Mumbai).
So, for that subset of professional engineers who have to know about not just time zones and summer time in general, but about tzdb regions in particular, you can use tzdb IDs.
Yup. It's a numerically small group I know, but is the one I primarily serve. Don't forget about us! :)
If there are are engineers who have to know about tzdb regions, but aren't yet familiar with the tzdb, the documentation for whatever product is being discussed should explain it to them - including the rules from the Theory file, so they understand that the names don't necessarily correspond to, and aren't intended to correspond to, the layman's notion of the name for a "time zone", or "the most important city in z time zone, for some definition of "most important"", or anything such as that.
Basically, just provide a link to the Theory file. Cheers! |---------------------------------------------------------------------| | Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. | Chief Developer | | | Paravel Systems | |---------------------------------------------------------------------| | There are two ways of constructing a software design. One is to | | make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies; the | | other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious | | deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. | | | | -- C.A.R Hoare | |---------------------------------------------------------------------|