On Wed, 14 Jan 2026 at 19:02, Paul Menzel via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
I looked for *Doha*, but didn’t find it in GNOME [1].
Looking through the Time Zone Database archive, there is in `asia` [3]:

     # Bahrain
     # Qatar
     # Zone     NAME            STDOFF  RULES   FORMAT  [UNTIL]
     Zone       Asia/Qatar      3:26:08 -       LMT     1920     # Al Dawhah / Doha
                        4:00    -       %z      1972 Jun
                        3:00    -       %z

The zone ID for Doha is indeed named Asia/Qatar, as you found.  There are other places named Doha in Asia, so the name "Qatar" was chosen to avoid ambiguity.

This principle is applied in a few other places as well — for example, America/Puerto_Rico instead of "San Juan" and America/Miquelon instead of "St Pierre".

is there another way to make it easier for people to find the right time
zone entry?

In general, we continue to recommend that end-users use a tool like our tzselect or something similar packaged in their operating system to help find the proper zone ID, rather than perusing through tzdata source code directly.

--
Tim Parenti