On Nov 23, 2019, at 1:10 AM, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
On 11/22/19 10:06 PM, John Pye wrote:
What is the basis for deciding which cities are included or excluded from the database? Does being the national capital, and the major city in its own state/territory warrant inclusion, or is there another criterion?
The latter. See <https://data.iana.org/time-zones/theory.html#naming>.
In particular, this means that people shouldn't look for *their* city, or for the major city nearest to them, if they're looking for the name to use in the tzdb ID setting they want. A lot of people in California, for example, will fail to find America/San_Francisco or America/San_Jose in the database, they'll only find America/Los_Angeles even though they're a lot closer to San Francisco or San Jose than they are to Los Angeles. User interfaces for selecting a time zone should not rely on the set of tzdb IDs being a comprehensive list of cities.