Seconded On 2014-10-02 19:34, Stephen Colebourne wrote:
Just to note my continued unhappiness with the conversions of zones to aliases.
The recent change to map Harare to Maputo broke a test in Joda-Time (the most widely used 3rd party library in Java for date/time, probably used by millions of developers). This means that the many users of Joda-Time will get errors when they try to recompile the latest jar file, a process that has worked fine for years. In order to make the test pass I now have to special case to say that either Harare or Maputo is a valid value.
This issue occurs because Joda-Time normalises all aliases to the actual zone as per TZDB data. Thus a request for
DateTimeZone zone = DateTimeZone.forID("Africa/Harare");
which use to return a zone with the ID "Africa/Harare" now returns "Africa/Maputo". This means that users can no longer get a zone that represents their country for half of Africa and the Carribean.
I cannot stress enough that these utterly unecessary changes have and will continue to cause observable differences in end-user applications. I remain firmly of the opinion that there should be at least one actual Zone entry for each ISO defined territory/country, and that these recent changes should not be described as minor tidying.
Stephen
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