On Thu, 21 Feb 2019 at 00:09, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
Although these names may be inappropriate for nontechnical users, they're explicitly not designed for that, and attempting to support them in applications they're not designed for will likely cause everybody more trouble than it's worth. It's not clear that we should continue to cater to such attempts by splitting or renaming timezones for purely political reasons.
Its absolutely clear to me that TZDB should provide such identifiers. Java exposes all Link entries as first class citizens precisely for this reason. It really doesn't matter what TZDB maintainers think the IDs should be used for in some perfect theoretical view. What actually matters is how they are used in real life by real end users. The logical result of this course of action is that downstream projects/users will have to create their own identifiers. Do you want that? Going "la la la" and trying to pretend that countries don't exist is IMO ridiculous and will cause maintainers far more pain. Stephen