On 2/20/19 4:37 AM, Stephen Colebourne wrote:
When a country splits, it is usually for painful reasons. The idea that the half of the country should be forced to use the old identifier simply isn't tenable.
And yet (as Hans-Joerg Happel mentions) Ubuntu and other systems are doing just that in countries that have split up extraordinarily painfully, as shown in the example interaction below. So it seems this approach is tenable enough, at least for the technical interfaces that timezone names are designed for. Although these names may be inappropriate for nontechnical users, they're explicitly not designed for that, and attempting to support them in applications they're not designed for will likely cause everybody more trouble than it's worth. It's not clear that we should continue to cater to such attempts by splitting or renaming timezones for purely political reasons. ---- $ tzselect Please identify a location so that time zone rules can be set correctly. Please select a continent, ocean, "coord", or "TZ". 1) Africa 2) Americas 3) Antarctica 4) Asia 5) Atlantic Ocean 6) Australia 7) Europe 8) Indian Ocean 9) Pacific Ocean 10) coord - I want to use geographical coordinates. 11) TZ - I want to specify the timezone using the Posix TZ format. #? 7 Please select a country whose clocks agree with yours. 1) Albania 18) Guernsey 35) Poland 2) Andorra 19) Hungary 36) Portugal 3) Austria 20) Ireland 37) Romania 4) Belarus 21) Isle of Man 38) Russia 5) Belgium 22) Italy 39) San Marino 6) Bosnia & Herzegovina 23) Jersey 40) Serbia 7) Britain (UK) 24) Latvia 41) Slovakia 8) Bulgaria 25) Liechtenstein 42) Slovenia 9) Croatia 26) Lithuania 43) Spain 10) Czech Republic 27) Luxembourg 44) Svalbard & Jan Mayen 11) Denmark 28) Malta 45) Sweden 12) Estonia 29) Moldova 46) Switzerland 13) Finland 30) Monaco 47) Turkey 14) France 31) Montenegro 48) Ukraine 15) Germany 32) Netherlands 49) Vatican City 16) Gibraltar 33) North Macedonia 50) Åland Islands 17) Greece 34) Norway #? 6 The following information has been given: Bosnia & Herzegovina Therefore TZ='Europe/Belgrade' will be used. Selected time is now: Thu Feb 21 01:00:44 CET 2019. Universal Time is now: Thu Feb 21 00:00:44 UTC 2019. Is the above information OK? 1) Yes 2) No #? 1 You can make this change permanent for yourself by appending the line TZ='Europe/Belgrade'; export TZ to the file '.profile' in your home directory; then log out and log in again. Here is that TZ value again, this time on standard output so that you can use the ./tzselect command in shell scripts: Europe/Belgrade