A separate zonenow.tab makes it (relatively) easy to add an option to tzselect that only presents current zones. (Alternatively, the existing mechanism of specifying the zone table with an environment variable can be sued.)

    @dashdashado

    --ado

On Fri, Jan 6, 2023 at 8:03 PM Paul Eggert via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
On 2023-01-06 16:26, Benjamin Drung via tz wrote:
> We do not use Swiss time in Germany.

I installed the attached to try to make that a bit clearer.

> Should zone1970.tab reflect the current status

No, as zone1970.tab partitions the world into regions that agree from
1970 through the foreseeable future.

It would make sense to have another file 'zonenow.tab' that would
partition the world into regions that agree from now through the
foreseeable future; this would have fewer regions than zone1970.tab,
just as zone1970.tab has fewer regions than zone.tab.

zonenow.tab would benefit users who don't care about past timestamps,
since they'd have fewer timezones to choose from and so could avoid some
confusion. It wouldn't need to mention Europe/Zurich, for example, so
this whole business of Büsingen vs the rest of Germany would vanish.