April 16, 2013
4:55 a.m.
On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 9:14 AM, Tim Thornton <tt@smartcomsoftware.com> wrote: > Can I suggest that before we wade in and change time zone abbreviations we > ought to step back and agree on what basis the abbreviations are set. And documenting this in the Theory file may help in enforcement. > This may be by a number of possible criteria, to name a few: > - what is specified by the laws governing that area Does not work, there can be several esp. in multilingual countries. It will also involve Romanization for non-Latin script definition in single language countries, so increasing complexity. > - what is in common place usage by the inhabitants of that area Same as above. > - creation of a unique and consistent time zone nomenclature, removing the > inconsistencies of the above two methods Looks good and the current implementation - English language as source - ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes as source - structure in %s work in that direction > - an arbitrary abbreviation for internal use by the TZ code and data that > may approximate the above arbitrary and approximation seems to be contradictory to me. > Also, we need to think through whether changes should be applied > retrospectively or not, or whether perhaps we run a new set of abbreviations > in parallel to the old ones, which become deprecated as they are replaced by > the new ones. That would require tzcode change. > Unless we do this first, changes are likely to be made on the basis of who > shouts loudest, or what the TZ Coordinator likes most > regardless of any merit they may have, and as those > promoting changes will each have their own agendas I would expect the naming > to become even less consistent than it is. Depends on how much extra inconsistency the TZ Coordinator lets in. > I don't use the abbreviations in my use of the database, so apart from > having to dig through all of the noise that this debate generates on the > mailing list it doesn't affect me much. But perhaps a good starting point > would be to review how the time zone abbreviations in this project are > currently used, and also what ISO and web standards there may already be for > naming of time zones outside of this project, and decide whether we should > aim to align with one of them. On could also approach ISO and ask them to design a standard. -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com