On May 21, 11:37am, zefram@fysh.org (Zefram) wrote: -- Subject: Re: [tz] Dropping iso3166.tab | Paul Eggert wrote: | >I have been thinking of proposing to drop iso3166.tab from the | >tz distribution, and to drop all uses of country codes. | >This would help simplify maintenance, as it would mean | >that the database would be unaffected by political | >issues such as whether Kosovo is a country, | | The association of time zones with countries is useful, despite the | somewhat fuzzy and occasionally contentious nature of country boundaries. | It is, of course, entirely proper that the notion of "country" doesn't | influence the zone naming scheme, for many more reasons than any present | controversy about country status. Segregating the country/zone link data | into a separate file, with its own update mechanism, was a wise choice. I totally agree. We should not remove the country-timezone association; it has been there for a long time and it is useful. The iso3166 list of countries is the de-facto standard used everywhere (in website list of countries for example). Ignoring it does not make us apolitical, it makes us bending over the pressure from a few highly politically-biased semi-anonymous folks. christos