[ Resent due to error in MUA operation; please discard previous. ] Ephraim Silverberg wrote:
With regard to the populations of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, there are two municipal entities: the Municipality of Jerusalem and the Municipality of Tel-Aviv-Jafo (note that Tel-Aviv and Jafo are one municipal entity so perhaps Asia/Tel_Aviv_Jafo would be a better way to express this alias to Asia/Jerusalem) -- see http://www.tel-aviv.gov.il/
There concepts Greater/Metro Jerusalem and Greater/Metro Tel-Aviv are literary and, perhaps, political concepts but do not represent any real municipal boundaries. Yet, those "Greater Area" are very probably the concepts which are relevant here, which is about the appreciation of which is the "most populous among locations in [the area]."
Perhaps the loosely-defined terms reflect the fact that this part of Theory was written in 1997 to fix in words a long-standing tradition, in a different context than today's: perhaps they reflect a bias toward the situation of USA, where a number of states have a relatively small city, like Sacramento, as official capital, when it is easier and much more common to identify the area with a bigger city, like Los Angeles, which is also where a bigger part of the TZ users will be actually living. But I am pretty sure the intent is not to stick with the "municipal limits" (whatever this may mean) to determine the name of the zones: the idea seems clearly to aim at the easiest-to-guess location, for example when you reach a new place and need to reconfigure (quickly) your system to show the correct clock. Antoine