Very good summary of the issue. Thank you. Yes, I would agree that for those that state they have issues with these names, they appear incorrect or humiliating - whether that was the intent or not. On 2018-10-03 17:13, Volodymyr Kostyrko wrote:
03.10.18 20:46, Guy Harris wrote:
On Oct 3, 2018, at 10:04 AM, Tim Parenti <tim@timtimeonline.com> wrote:
In particular, the spellings in current use by this project generally remain much more common in English-language media. This project attempts to reflect mainstream English-language spellings for place names (see theory.html), and explicitly does not attempt to reflect transliterations.
And, again, for the 5 trillionth time:
If a user interface shows the tzdb region names to most end users and requires most end users to set the tzdb region by selecting from a list of tzdb region names - and this includes names generated from tzdb region names, e.g. "helpfully" using "Los Angeles" in the "America" region rather than "America/Los_Angeles" to select the US Pacific time zone - it is not a good user interface.
Those names are identifiers for software use, just as LANG environment variable settings such as en_US.UTF-8 are identifiers for software use, *not* names that most end users should have to deal with, so making the names "look appropriate" is not the highest priority.
I must admit that you are right. But the point is that this is not the final position everyone can agree with.
Taking PHP community as a an example they are using raw zone names in their configuration files. If any thirdparty vendor would try to translate this zones in his application he will face a choice - to be correct about zone naming according to each language or to forfeit correctness in favor of clear and unambiguous configuration. And he should choose the latter. I can't blame him neither.
Renaming things others depend upon is also a very sloppy path that shouldn't being followed so easily. Though this raises a problem similar to "master-and-slave" concept. Most people are feeling fine with the names as they are just a hollow words that mean nothing to them, though for a very limited number of people who faced slavery or humiliation this will be just a trigger and they will not stop fighting to make everyone else stop treating this words as "normal" and not "shameful". Most of you feel nothing about Kiev/Kyiv difference, but for a lot of Ukrainians the former is a sign of a communist slavery, the mark of alien possession over they father's land. Leaving things as they are will not solve the problem for them, and they wouldn't stop trying to change it. That's politics. Even if you try to stay unbiased and techy you have to choose something, and this choice will make your side.
Probably this can be easily solved by scrapping full town names and switching to some indices like UAK/UAZ/UAU but that's totally out of the scope of my knowledge of tz database rules and principles. And also in this case I'm a biased person. Totally not for me to decide.
Thank you.