On 10/4/18 16:00, Paul Eggert wrote:
On 10/4/18 7:33 AM, Michael Douglass wrote:
Opaque ids are what some consumers have been asking for for some time because of the political implications of the names.
I would rather not change the zone names currently used in tzdb source files, as the change would be a hassle for both maintainers and users, and the existing names simplify maintenance since they are easier to read than opaque IDs would be.
Although we could add an auxiliary table that maps existing names to short, stable, and reasonably opaque identifiers, CLDR is already maintaining such a table and it'd be confusing if we attempted to duplicate that work; plus, such a table would not be useful to tzcode so it wouldn't be tested well by us. For now, we are probably better off improving the already-existing suggestion to use CLDR facilities for consumers worried about politics. Proposed patch attached.
I believe this group should be the authoritative source for such an id. What happens when zones split etc? There's presumably a delay between the split and an appearance in cldr data. While we continue to provide only the name as the key to a zone people will continue to mistake it for something they can present to users. Criticizing such people isn't going to stop it. Not having a uid in the data means we have no choice but to use that 'human-readable' key. I'd propose adding a UID to VTIMEZONE - happy to write the spec - but at the moment there's no usable value.