From: "Yoshito Umaoka" <yoshito_umaoka@us.ibm.com> Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2018 14:32:49 -0500 Subject: Re: [tz] OpenJDK/CLDR/ICU/Joda issues with Ireland change | The goal of CLDR is to provide names that people in a locale | can reasonably understand - and standard/daylight | names requires that people can distinguish one from another. Why? What is the motivation for that? In real life, I see just the opposite - for better or worse, I get to see a fair amount of US sport on TV, and during that (never to ignore a commercial opportunity) there are often ads for other programs (which are generally not available here...) and from what I can see they are always advertised as being at 9 ET / 8 CT (or whatever) - that is, just "eastern time" with no mention of an S or a D. "Why would that be?" someone might ask... Because in practice no-one cares - all that matters is what time should a viewer switch on the TV to the relevant channel if they want to watch. That is, a sync between the event and wall clock time. What offset it happens to be from UTC this week, and whether it will be the same offset next week, is irrelevant. This is not to say that knowing the offsets is useless, there are applications for that .. it is just that the end user mostly does not care, and the long/short names don't seem to have any other use than to be presented to end users. After all, CLDR, one application you'd think would make use of the names that exist (without its versions) doesn't even bother to use tzdb's names - choosing instead to simply ignore them. If this applocation prefers to find some other way, how could be expect that any other would be different? The time zone is only mentioned in US ads because the US is a country with multipe zones, and with synchronised broadcasts, the clock time will be different in different regions. In countries without that, there is normally (from my observation) nothing more than the time. I suspect it is probably like that in Japan too, isn't it? That is why I asked for an example of something real, where the timezone information is actually used for some real practical purpose (just displaying it because we have it does not count.) So far (and I know it has not been very long) there has been nothing. | "generic" name is not in TZ db database. You're right, it isn't, and perhaps should be. For all zones, the relevant (English) string is probably "Time" (abbreviation, "T"). kre