I favor retaining the region codes, which are useful, and eliminating the endless discussions by following ISO 3166 exactly, no deviations, no discussion. On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 9:38 AM, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
On 05/21/13 09:18, Paul_Koning@Dell.com wrote:
by this argument you might have merged the entry for Venezuela with other South American entries a few years ago -- but then the administration there decided to do something different.
I think this would still work without user problems. Suppose in 2000 we had merged America/Caracas, America/Aruba, America/Curacao, and America/Port_of_Spain. These zones would have continued to work as before, because there would be 'backward' entries. Then, in 2007, when Venezuela decided to move its clocks, we would have split the America/Caracas zone into two regions, America/Caracas and (say) America/Curacao, and all the old names would still continue to work. Splitting zones is a normal part of time zone maintenance, and this sort of thing should be routine.
It's true that keeping these zones distinct insulates users from plausible future political changes -- but the downside is that there are zillions of plausible future political changes, and once we get into the business of guessing which changes are plausible enough to deserve a separate entry in the tz database, we are getting into the business of politics, which is an area we're better off avoiding.