On Mon, 7 Jun 2021 at 15:24, Eliot Lear via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
Without getting into any of the substance of any of the proposals you mentioned, a hopefully minor aside:
On 06.06.21 10:08, Stephen Colebourne via tz wrote:
I acknowledge that the above is a significant change to TZBD, but it does more fully align TZDB with the Governmental authorities that actually define time zones.
The goal of this database has never been to align to governmental authorities, but to express what people in a region think local time is. Let's please not lose sight of that.
And yet there are (older) TZ region names for many countries, including Eire, Egypt, Turkey, GB, Israel, Hongkong, PRC, NZ... There are also modern names with countries/states in them, eg America/Argentina/Cordoba and America/Indiana/Indianapolis. Given this, I think "never" is a significant overstretch. "what people in a region think" is essentially unknowable. What governmental authorities define is generally well recorded. Where we can accurately fnd data to indicate that a region is not following the lead of the governmental authorities then I agree we need to make sure that those people's experience can be expressed in some form by TZDB. But I think that governmental authorities so dominate the field of timezones, and what our downstream users perceive of timezones, that we need to reflect it. Putting our heads in the sand and pretending that governmental authorities don't exist is not helpful. Stephen