I'm forwarding this message from Tobias Conradi, who is not on the time zone mailing list. Those of you who are on the list, please direct replies appropriately. --ado ________________________________________ From: Mr tobias conradi [tobias_conradi@yahoo.de] Sent: Sunday, September 11, 2011 12:19 AM To: tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov Subject: Theory - zone name, zone creation, zone lifetime Theory reads: To represent this data, the world is partitioned into regions whose clocks all agree about time stamps that occur after the somewhat-arbitrary cutoff point of the POSIX Epoch (1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC). Issue: 1) Where are these regions listed? The only lists of geographical areas I could find are: - the zones in zone.tab - (current) countries in iso3166.tab Theory reads: Use ISO 3166 (see the file iso3166.tab) to help decide whether something is a country. [...] or when locations change countries (e.g. Hong Kong from UK colony to China) Issue: 1) "help to decide" - decision process is undefined. 2) Hong Kong is listed in iso3166.tab as HK.For the purpose of zone creation is it 2a) a country,then it is confusing to say it changed country, or 2b) is it part of China (CN) then it is confusing to mark it with HK 3) In case HK and one of the zones in CN observed the same time since 1970, and that HK is not a country, would there be a merge and would one zone be dropped from zone.tab and any corresponding pre-1970 history be deleted? Theory reads: Within a file name component, use only ASCII letters Issue: 1) It is not defined what the term "file name component" refers to in the context of zone naming. Theory reads: E.g. prefer `Paris' to `France', since France has had multiple time zones. Issue: 1) It does not matter what zones France "had" in the past. 2) It may matter that Europe/Paris might be split in the future. 3) There is no proof in zone.tab that France had multiple time zones at all, there is only one line marked "FR": FR+4852+00220Europe/Paris -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin, Germany http://tobiasconradi.com