On 05/20/2013 05:10 PM, Paul_Koning@Dell.com wrote:
Perhaps iso3166.tab can be separated out into its own distribution.
Thanks, that's a good idea. Let me try to flesh it out. We can do something like the following: (1) Remove iso3166.tab. Others can take up its maintenance if they like. (2) Say that zone.tab's column 1 is a comment, present only for backwards compatibility, and with no information as far as the tz database is concerned. We can describe the backward-compatibility issue in a comment, and mention that the contents of column 1 do not imply an official position or endorsement of any territorial claims. (3) Merge all Zones that are currently split only because of national boundaries. For example, merge Africa/Bangui, Africa/Brazzaville, etc., into Africa/Lagos, since these zones have all had the same clocks since 1970. We would of course retain backward-compatibility links for the merged zones, so they'd continue to work. The point of (2) is that the installers for FreeBSD, Ubuntu, etc. could continue to use zone.tab unmodified. Our installer, tzselect, can easily be modified to ignore column 1, so that we'd be eating our own dog food.