On Thu, 15 Jan 2026 at 00:57, Tim Parenti via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
On Wed, 14 Jan 2026 at 19:02, Paul Menzel via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
I looked for *Doha*, but didn’t find it in GNOME [1]. Looking through the Time Zone Database archive, there is in `asia` [3]:
# Bahrain # Qatar # Zone NAME STDOFF RULES FORMAT [UNTIL] Zone Asia/Qatar 3:26:08 - LMT 1920 # Al Dawhah / Doha 4:00 - %z 1972 Jun 3:00 - %z
The zone ID for Doha is indeed named Asia/Qatar, as you found. There are other places named Doha in Asia, so the name "Qatar" was chosen to avoid ambiguity.
This principle is applied in a few other places as well — for example, America/Puerto_Rico instead of "San Juan" and America/Miquelon instead of "St Pierre".
is there another way to make it easier for people to find the right time zone entry?
In general, we continue to recommend that end-users use a tool like our tzselect or something similar packaged in their operating system to help find the proper zone ID, rather than perusing through tzdata source code directly.
See https://data.iana.org/time-zones/theory.html#naming GNOME should be mapping the time zone names to user-friendly names. Unfortunately, most UIs fail to do this and only expose the names from the underlying raw data set.