On Fri, May 16, 2025 at 12:01 AM Doug Ewell via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
There’s another problem, though. The tz database is not a gazetteer or other official reference to the “correct” spelling of city names. The identifiers in the tz database are not meant to be presented directly to users as part of a UI.
Rather, tzids are internal identifiers, sort of like variable names or URLs or API endpoints. They are intended to be stable. When you change one, you create an incompatibility with systems that expect the old name.
The theory file says to “Use mainstream English spelling” in place names, which often leads to requests like this on the basis that the locally preferred spelling or transliteration must automatically be the mainstream English spelling. That’s not reality. It takes time for another government’s preference to take hold in English usage—we still don’t really use “Czechia” in the US, and might never do so—but even if and when it finally does, the stability problem remains.
And you should change Rome to Roma! (this is a joke, I actually understand that the tzdb uses English names. Rome/Roma and Uzhgorod/Uzhhorod is the same case though, with the aggravation that Uzhgorod has been the official transliteration since the stone age and Uzhhorod is the result of a very recent change in the official transliteration...)
(Lest there be any misunderstanding, this has nothing to do with being pro-Ukraine or pro-Russia.)
Absolutely.