Stephen Colebourne wrote:
I appeal for others to comment on the proposal, as it really is pretty darn simple and effective. #1 ensures that every region considered to be important enough to have an ISO-3166 code is given a full historic time-zone rule.
We used to have that rule. I'm OK either way on this.
#2 ensures that no political faux pas occurs by linking across boundaries.
This actually sounds like a source of *more* political tension. The whole concept of inter-country links (which you're saying we should avoid) depends on us associating each city with exactly one ISO 3166 region that "contains" it. There will on occasion be political disagreements about which one that should be. (Even apart from the ISO 3166 regions that uncontroversially overlap.) But if we do allow linking a city to a region that it is not in, we can sidestep these arguments. We're not claiming that the city is in your country; we're just claiming that it's the biggest city that uses the same timezone rules as you. People will still argue about which country a multiply-linked city "really" belongs to, but the argument is irrelevant to us. I think we could do with explicitly adopting an inclusive policy for zone.tab entries. Say: we include a city-country link iff there is a significant population that self-identifies with that country and uses the clock behaviour of that city. This is a relatively objective criterion that doesn't opine on the matters that are subject to big political disagreements. This approach applies regardless of whether we're attempting to provide every country with a named zone that is exclusively its own (your rule #1). It also applies regardless of the inclusiveness of our approach to pre-1970 data. Of course, a more inclusive view would lead to using fewer cross links. In the above, I'm using the term "country" as a synonym for "ISO 3166 region", by which I mean a region to which ISO 3166 assigns a regular alpha-2 code. I think this is uncontroversial ground on this list, but worth explicating in this context: the biggest political question we're ducking is what constitutes a country. Delegating that decision to ISO 3166 is an excellent policy, and was expressed well by Jon Postel in RFC 1591 "Domain Name System Structure and Delegation" (1994-03): # The IANA is not in the business of deciding what is and what is # not a country. # # The selection of the ISO 3166 list as a basis for country code # top-level domain names was made with the knowledge that ISO has a # procedure for determining which entities should be and should not # be on that list. This policy worked very well for the DNS until the Internet became big enough to wag the dog. I think it'll work for us for a while longer. -zefram