On 10/21/22 19:14, Paul-Cathy Unger via tz wrote:
I'm wondering what the rationale is for using island / province names for some Pacific nations and city names for others
When I chose those names decades ago, I preferred island names as I figured they would be easier for most users to recognize and/or remember. However, I chose a city name when the island name was ambiguous (e.g., Samoa) or when the island is so large that a time zone split is plausible (e.g., New Guinea). Guadalcanal is neither large nor ambiguously named, so I used the island name in that case. I just now set the time zone on Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS, and it gave me a little map of the world that I clicked on; there was no drop down list of names in the traditional sense. Perhaps you can ask your distro maintainers to use that part of Ubuntu, as TZDB names are not meant for general user consumption. For more info, please see <https://data.iana.org/time-zones/theory.html#naming>, which says. 'Inexperienced users are not expected to select these names unaided. Distributors should provide documentation and/or a simple selection interface that explains each name via a map or via descriptive text like "Czech Republic" instead of the timezone name "|Europe/Prague|".' If the name's user-visible explanation or description is inappropriate, you might try writing to whoever maintains that (it's probably not us...).