On Fri, Nov 05, 2021 at 02:53:23PM -0700, Brian Park via tz wrote:
On Fri, Nov 5, 2021 at 12:01 PM Brian Park <brian@xparks.net> wrote:
I agree that it is conceptually cleaner if the Core TZDB identifiers were internal only. But I understand that some people would consider ISO-country identifiers to be out of scope of this project, although there are many ad hoc ones currently in the database. I think a file like 'countryzone' should be added only if there are people willing to maintain such a list. It may need to be a separate project, to avoid forcing the TZ Coordinator to pick up the slack if those maintainers drop off.
Following up my own post, I took an initial stab at what this 'countryzone' file would look like, and immediately ran into problems that convinces me that this does *not* belong in the TZDB project. The scope seems too large, so it seems better as a separate project.
I started from an ISO-3166 CSV file (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_3166_country_codes for a human readable version), and I found:
1) Many country names are too long to fit into 14 characters. Let's say we relax that constraint because we deprecate support for any old Unix system that cannot support these longer file names. But there are countries like "Heard Island and McDonald Islands", "South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands", and "United States Minor Outlying Islands", and "British Indian Ocean Territory". Just from an ergonomics perspective, we should find a way to shorten these very long names.
2) If we shorten some countries, like "Bosnia and Herzegovina" to just "Bosnia" for convenience, are we going to offend people? I don't know anyone from Bosnia and Herzegovina, so I have no idea. Each country that we shorten needs to be researched carefully.
3) At least 5 countries have non-ASCII characters in their ISO names: "Côte d'Ivoire ", "Curaçao", "Åland Islands", "Saint Barthélemy", "Réunion". Personally, I would like to use only ASCII characters because they are the lowest common denominator that is guaranteed to work, outside of mainframes using EBCDIC. If we remove these non-ASCII characters, are we going to offend the people of those countries, even though these are supposed to be English versions of their country names?
This also brings up the question about why any of the subregion identifiers should be included? They are not countries and I find it hard to defend that Jan Mayen (population: 4 (scientists on the weather station)) should have it's own time zone when the US state of e.g. Texas shouldn't. /MF