On 2/25/19 2:32 AM, Martin Burnicki wrote:
If the current time zone names should indeed just be taken as IDs rather than real names then IMO it would be very helpful if there also was a list of mappings provided that links readable display names to TZDB ID names.
tzdb provides this in its combination of the files zone1970.tab and iso3166.tab, the latter useful if the former simply lists country codes. For example, zone1970.tab maps America/Porto_Velho to "Rondônia" (since the country of Brazil has multiple timezones), and maps Europe/Prague to CZ,SK which iso3166.tab in turn maps to "Czech Republic" and "Slovakia" (since this timezone has multiple countries). The tzdb files support only American English; as Tony mentioned, for other locales CLDR is the way to go.
For example, the zone "Europe/Macedonia" is displayed as "Europa/Makedonien" on my Linux/KDE system set to German language. That's odd, as tzdb has no zone named "Europe/Macedonia". North Macedonia is currently represented by Europe/Belgrade. If tzdb had a timezone named "Europe/Macedonia", we'd have to worry about renaming it to "Europe/North_Macedonia" now.
Perhaps the strings "Europe/Macedonia" and "Europa/Makedonien" are part of the KDE user interface to tzdb; if so, KDE will need to deal with the country's recent renaming.