On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 10:33, Larry Ober <larry.ober@att.net> wrote:
I don't really need the geo political information like country or city.
However it seems like tz is structured continent/country/city/..

As others have said, you do need the geo-political information.  And even that may not be sufficient.

There's a region in China where some people use Beijing time and others use local time.  Search in the TZ mailing list archives for Xinjiang and Urumqi.  One email renewing the discussion was dated May 2010.  The rest of the discussion (under a different subject which I haven't located in my archive, mainly for not looking hard enough) pre-dates that.

The upshot is though that even with a GPS database, you can't tell whether the wielder of the GPS-equipped system would prefer Beijing or Xinjiang time in that vicinity; it depends on who the wielder is.

--
Jonathan Leffler <jonathan.leffler@gmail.com>  #include <disclaimer.h>
Guardian of DBD::Informix - v2008.0513 - http://dbi.perl.org
"Blessed are we who can laugh at ourselves, for we shall never cease to be amused."