2007-05-30T22:10:28 yoshito_umaoka:
These are zone IDs, so I'd rather want to keep them unchanged. I think there are some applications which store the zone IDs in persistent data. In these applications, any changes in zond IDs will require mapping table for backward compatibility support.
Leaving aside the question of unicode, as I understand things (I'm a lurker, not a policy-maker) zone IDs are not expected to remain "stable" in the sense of the primary name not changing; when another city in the covered region grows to have substantially more population than the current primary, we shift that primary, and we'll rename the primary if a city's name in common english usage changes. But we build legacy compatibility links for every zone, any time there's a change; once a zone ID becomes valid it should remain valid forever more, and aside from bugfixes and addition of historical rules over time, the ID will continue to refer to the same timezone forever. -Bennett