Paul Eggert via tz <tz@iana.org> writes:
On 5/22/21 11:17 AM, Tim Parenti wrote:
In particular, the latter group (things like America/La_Paz -> Etc/GMT+4) seems to encourage things or behaviors which historically cause confusion, especially for novices:
We could avoid these problems by merging Etc/GMT+4 into America/La_Paz rather than vice versa. That would be easy to arrange, and would result in the same number of timezones. A downside would be that TZ='Etc/GMT+4' would no longer be equivalent to TZ='<-04>4' for pre-1970 timestamps, but those timestamps are out of scope anyway.
That seems really bad. If I ask for Etc/GMT+4, I should get a fixed GMT+4 offset for all time, not whatever the heck Bolivia's pre-1970 behavior was. Those zone names are not, or at least should not be, conditional on political decisions. IMO, Etc/GMT+4 is just an alternative way to spell the '<-04>4' notation ... one that could be very handy if dealing with software that knows the tzdb names but not POSIX notation. regards, tom lane