Paul Eggert via tz <tz@iana.org> writes:
Yes, others have proposed this, notably Russ Allbery in <https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-September/030518.html>. It's not clear, though, whether merely adding this level of indirection would be worth the cost. It wouldn't remove political concerns, for example. Nor would it address Zone splits any better than the current approach does.
Although it might be worth adding abstract IDs to implement a larger project, I'd like to see that larger project's outlines before opining.
I think it would be useful primarily if it made sense to hand off the political concerns to a different body that had the infrastructure to apply more political rules to making decisions (assuming that's considered appropriate). The Unicode CLDR, for example (although I have no idea if they want that duty). It handles zone splits better in the specific sense that it separates naming from adding the data and makes it uncontroversial to add a new abstract ID with different rules. It doesn't make it any easier to decide what to call that zone (if anything; it would be possible to have abstract zones that have no names), and where the existing name should point, which seems to be where most of the political disputes lie. It just enables those decisions to be made by a different party. If there's no desire to hand off the naming portions to a different body, the level of indirection may not serve any useful purpose. It does make it easier for different groups to maintain different sets of names while sharing the same underlying data, but that results in inconsistent behavior for users despite using the same name, which is presumably undesirable. (That's currently happening right now, however, and to a lesser extent happens if backzone is included in the data set.) -- Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>