Apart from issuers with Linux, I (and I suspect quite a few hours) use the tz data in applications. I find the country code very useful in giving guidance to the extent of a time zone, and would find it a pain if it disappeared. Also, I feel that going down this route becomes the thin end of the wedge. What would we do if the Palestinians and Israelis wanted different names for the city currently known as Jerusalem, for example? Unfortunately there will always be disputes over territories. But I think the best apolitical approach to take is to follow the lead of organisations such as ISO. Those people unhappy with this should resolve it with (in this example) ISO. Otherwise we remove data from the data set that is useful to may users and not used with any political judgement, merely to satisfy the people who are unhappy with the standards and see the tz data set as an easy target to meet their aims. Tim Smartcom Software Ltd Portsmouth Technopole Kingston Crescent Portsmouth PO2 8FA United Kingdom www.smartcomsoftware.com Smartcom Software is a limited company registered in England and Wales, registered number 05641521. -----Original Message----- From: tz-bounces@iana.org [mailto:tz-bounces@iana.org] On Behalf Of Paul Eggert Sent: 21 May 2013 05:34 To: Paul_Koning@Dell.com Cc: tz@iana.org Subject: Re: [tz] Dropping iso3166.tab On 05/20/2013 05:10 PM, Paul_Koning@Dell.com wrote:
Perhaps iso3166.tab can be separated out into its own distribution.
Thanks, that's a good idea. Let me try to flesh it out. We can do something like the following: (1) Remove iso3166.tab. Others can take up its maintenance if they like. (2) Say that zone.tab's column 1 is a comment, present only for backwards compatibility, and with no information as far as the tz database is concerned. We can describe the backward-compatibility issue in a comment, and mention that the contents of column 1 do not imply an official position or endorsement of any territorial claims. (3) Merge all Zones that are currently split only because of national boundaries. For example, merge Africa/Bangui, Africa/Brazzaville, etc., into Africa/Lagos, since these zones have all had the same clocks since 1970. We would of course retain backward-compatibility links for the merged zones, so they'd continue to work. The point of (2) is that the installers for FreeBSD, Ubuntu, etc. could continue to use zone.tab unmodified. Our installer, tzselect, can easily be modified to ignore column 1, so that we'd be eating our own dog food.