Gabriel Gaspar via tz wrote:
I have always wondered why it is that Brasilia is not listed as one of the time zones in the data base for South America.
This is covered in the Theory file, which says, "Use the most populous among locations in a zone, e.g. prefer 'Shanghai' to 'Beijing'. Among locations with similar populations, pick the best-known location, e.g. prefer 'Rome' to 'Milan'." In this respect Brazil is treated like other countries. In China, for example, although standard time is popularly called "北京时间" ("Beijing time"), the corresponding Zone name is Asia/Shanghai because Shanghai is the largest city in the region. The intent is that Zone names be English-language city labels rather than localized time zone names. For the latter, please see the CLDR project <http://cldr.unicode.org/>.