On Fri, Nov 5, 2021 at 8:47 AM Eliot Lear <lear@lear.ch> wrote:
On 05.11.21 16:26, Brian Park via tz wrote:
Can you explain why [no ISO countries]? Because it will cause arguments about disputed places? I think only a small minority of places around the world are disputed.
Over the time I have been following this group:
- YAR, South Yemen -> Yemen - Zaire -> DRC - East Germany, West Germany -> Germany - Yugoslavia -> Croatia, Serbia & Montenegro, Bosnia Herzegovina, Slovenia, Macedonia - Serbia & Montenegro -> Serbia, Montenegro - Serbia -> Serbia & Kosovo - Macedonia -> Northern Macedonia - Czechoslovakia, The Czech Republic, Slovakia - Czech Republic -> Czechia - Sudan -> Sudan, South Sudan - And then there's Russia and the Ukraine - Israel & Palestine - And South Africa and Namibia
I'm sure I'm missing a few.
You may say that these are a minority of nations, but these changes have NOT by themselves necessitated ANY work on the part of this project. That is a feature. To be clear, that work would involve someone taking a political stance, even if that means supporting UN decisions (that's a political decision).
Thanks for the historical context, this is a good list to have. It looks like some of those are name changes, and some of those are disputed regions. I think we would be able to create appropriate policies to govern the various situations. With my proposal of refactoring the ISO-country timezones into a separate 'countryzone' file, the churn would be isolated to that file. Perhaps there is a difference in perspective as well. As a downstream library maintainer, I almost always try to be an advocate of the end-users. I try to ask myself, "How can I make things easier for my users?", instead of "How can I make things easier for me, or the TZDB maintainers?" I understand the advantages of an abstract organization of timezones to prevent churn. But the lack of ISO-country based timezones causes a suboptimal experience for the end-users. We can solve that problem using a thin mapping layer on top of the more abstract timezone identifiers.
Better to stick with what we have: observe what people on the ground think the time is.
I've seen this a few times, but I don't understand it. No normal person on the ground thinks their time is "America/Los_Angeles". It's "US/Pacific". No normal person in Toronto thinks their time is "America/Toronto". Their country is not even America. They think their timezone is "Canada/Eastern". People are forced to use "America/Los_Angeles" or "America/Toronto" because the TZDB forced that nomenclature upon our users. It seems a mapping layer, like the 'countryzone' file containing ISO-countries, would be the one that provides the timezones that people use on the ground.