On 2021-05-10 18:04, Paul Eggert wrote:
Perhaps someone could add systematically-formatted comments to 'backzone' giving geographical coordinates for names like Asia/Hanoi that are not already mentioned in 'zone1970.tab'.
Yes, I understand. Just to make sure: my point is not a question only for backzone data. What happens with the proposed change is that any location name of a timezone in the mainline tzdb data can no longer be (easily) connected with geographical coordinates as soon as the location name (is a link and) also occurs in the backzone file. Rather, the corresponding geographic coordinates in zone.tab are no longer connected with the timezone name, only with an ISO country code. The same holds for several proposed lines in zone1070.tab such as AQ,KW,SA,YE +2438+04643 Etc/GMT-3 Arabia, Syowa What are these geographical coordinates supposed to indicate? Of course, there is no error (all the advertised functions of tzdb will continue to work, except perhaps choosing Syowa with tzselect) -- it is only my failure to understand the conceptual schema of the tzdb data. One of the successful design choices of the tzdb database was to identify timezones by locations (rather than by areas or countries), so that location names and location coordinates are equivalent means of identifying timezones of locations. Is this still true? Michael Deckers.