On Wed, 25 Jun 2014, Arthur David Olson wrote:
Should zic permit non-ASCII characters in zone names? In time zone abbreviations? If they are permitted, should zic warn about them?
Please don't permit characters outside the portable subset of ASCII in zone names. Comments in text files are non-critical, and if they appear mangled due to incorrect settings (such as disagreement between different software layers about what locale is in use), or due to absence of support in my display font, or if they are incomprehensible due to my unfamilarity with the language or character set involved, then it doesn't matter too much. On the other hand, if I am unable to enter a zone name due to incorrect settings, or due to missing support in my keyboard driver, or merely due to personal unfamiliarity with the "foreign" characters involved, then I won't be able to select the correct zone. This problem gets worse, for me, as character sets get larger: I might be able to figure out how to coerce my keyboard driver into emitting the codes for <latin small letter e with grave>, but I have very little chance of telling whether two somewhat-similar glyphs are different renderings of the same Chinese character, or different characters entirely, and I certainly don't know how to make my keyboard emit the right codes for them. This attitude is unfair to people for whom the letters A to Z and the digits 0 to 9 are foreign, unfamiliar, difficult to read, or difficult to input. I recognise that unfairness, but do not have a solution for them. --apb (Alan Barrett)