On Fri, 5 Nov 2021 at 04:17, Brian Park <brian@xparks.net> wrote:
* Descriptive: Paul wants to describe the timezones of the world without regard to how those time zones were created, and merge them into the smallest set that can generate the timekeeping rules. I can see that in this view, merging timezones from different countries into the same equivalence class is reasonable.
The minimalist view espoused by Paul is, IMO, perfectly rationale if, and only if: a) there is no pre-1970 history associated with each abstract region b) the abstract regions have names that don't imply national boundaries/limits on their scope Merging without these two things being true merely results in a horrible mess. There is a perfectly viable solution to the problem if maintenance of post-1970 timezones was moved to a different repo along the lines above. This repo could then import the post-1970 definitions and unite them with the pre-1970 ones (with a different volunteer doing that work).
* Prescriptive: I think Stephen and others start with the fact that time zones are the creations of political organizations which write the regulations that define the timezones. Those governing bodies are predominantly organized by country in a hierarchical structure. In this view, it does *not* make sense to merge timezones from different countries. This view also implies that the TZ identifiers should reflect the political organizational structure of the world.
I don't think this is really a good summary. All I'm asking for is a return to the system that was in use up to 2014 or so. I'm asking because it is what end users expect, it works well, its backwards compatible, and it models how timezone rules actually work in the real world, ie. sometimes based on countries and sometimes real entities the general public are aware of. I do not want to see a hierarchical structure of country code and location, like FR/Paris. Examples like Crimea demonstrate why this is a bad idea, plus ISO codes get reused eventually making them bad identifiers. The connection between Europe/Paris and ISO code FR tzdb currently has is IMO at a completely different level, and far less politically contentious.
For this to work, I think we need to clarify the semantics of the 'Link' records in the TZ database. As far as I can tell, there are at least 3 different meanings of the Link record:
1) Link Canonical Deprecated * Deprecated is an old zone which should no longer be used 2) Link Canonical Alternate * alternate spelling or alias, but not deprecated 3) Link Canonical Merged * zones which were merged because they have the same rules by chance, but there is no semantic relationship to each other
It is undoubtedly true that there are different meanings of Link. Stephen