Stephen Colebourne via tz:
What this does is push the problem to downstream projects. My hope is that downstream users will understand and appreciate that:
- Iceland's time zone now points at Africa/Abidjan - Sweden's time zone data now points at Europe/Berlin - Norway's time zone data now points at Europe/Berlin - Netherland's time-zone data now points at Europe/Brussels and many more.
The removal of the data isn't so much of a problem as trying to explain to users what they get. In the system I am writing, I am using zone1970.tab as the source for time zones, using the time zone name (sans continent) and the description. I sort time zones on current time, so it is fairly easy to find the zones that correspond to the current location as long as the system time is correct. The problem is trying to understand which time zone to pick when none of the cities in your country are listed. Windows already has this problem with its time zone picker, it has a couple of time zones that cover CET, none that list any cities or contries that are relevant to me, so I just have to pick one at random. Moving the TZDB in that direction is not the best solution. I have been considering switching to global-tz for the next update, but I just realize that it has the same zone1970.tab file as regular tz, so that will not help at all (I am writing for an embedded system where we cut off old data from before build time, as it does not preserve information across reboots in anything but fully written-out text form). -- \\// Peter - http://www.softwolves.pp.se/