On 2017-12-04 12:52, Michael Douglass wrote:
On 12/4/17 13:09, Brian Inglis wrote:
On 2017-12-04 07:05, David Patte ₯ wrote:
On 2017-12-04 02:52, Paul Eggert wrote:
Although we cannot avoid politics entirely, we should strive to avoid as much as possible in tzdb. For example, tzdb should not take any position on Israel vs Palestine, North Korea vs South Korea, or Canada vs the United States. It's not our job to address such disputes and it would be a waste of our limited resources if the disputes got in the way of our job. Its convenient to frame Palestine in this manner, but if you truly wish to remove your own politics from the db, the politics of the Palestinians themselves should be the deciding factor here. I wouldn't mind if the country codes were eliminated from zone.tab to avoid politics - it does not serve much function - make that another UI issue to argue with each distro or vendor! Until then we should go as usual with the de facto majority situation on the ground to avoid political claims.> This issue always surfaces at one point or another. I and others have argued for a long time that timezone ids should be opaque.> It's really up to some localization feature to provide meaningful names for those timezones. The data for those localization already exists - providing region/city names for timezones has just led people to believe they mean more than they do. I'd suggest a first step would be to provide a unique - reasonably short - opaque id for each definition. That allows us to build out a localization framework around it. Feel free to write a script to mv each path to its lat/long (and create a link to its previous name(s) for compatibility) as that is the only other reasonably stable property of the tz db usable as a name and a l14n reference: otherwise people will assume the id will always be around and mean something, as with zone names, country codes, tz abbrs, etc.
Using municipality names has always had the problems that the names are only unique within, and often span, internal administrative divisions, and sometimes continents; and may be changed by politicians, or change countries; whereas lat/longs are infrequently corrected and probably accurate enough across geodetic datum shifts. The datum is not specified in Theory: it probably should be. Has anyone ever checked to see, or knows from geodetic principles, if different datums used since inception of standard times makes any significant difference in coordinates? I know the deltas can be ~.5km: too large to be ignored for surveying and navigation applications. -- Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada