Brian Park via tz said:
Can you explain why? Because it will cause arguments about disputed places? I think only a small minority of places around the world are disputed.
But they're the ones that create all the noise.
By separating these ISO-country timezones into a 'countryzone' file, perhaps we can confine the debate into a smaller section of the TZDB. We could create duplicate entries (i.e. Country1/City, Country2/City), or create a pseudo-country called "Disputed" (i.e. Disputed/City). The point is, we can create policies that govern these disputed regions.
How do you handle the meta-issue that it's disputed whether some of these issues are even disputed? The government in Beijing will tell you that there is no dispute about Taiwan: it's part of China. Other people will tell you that there is a dispute. Similarly for Crimea. And I'm sure many others. I can already imagine all the complaints that something "obvious" is being falsely labelled as disputed. Equally, someone can raise a dispute about almost anything: which disputes are you going to tag as disputed?
Could we move 'countryzone' into a separate project?
Of course you could. As a simple starting point, you could try creating the list you want *ignoring the pre-1970 data issue* and see how it maps to TZDB.
Virtual no one in the world thinks of "America" as referring to all of "North America" and "South America".
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