Speaking of which, after reading naming convention of zones, wouldn't it still be better to rename the zone to Asia/Beijing mowadays? As almost all users are referring to the zone as "Beijing Time", if in any case there are different time standard emerge that caused Beijing and Shamghai to use different tome standard instead, then it would be more likely for the zone's user to think the Beijing time is a time being continued while Shanghai time would be another new time. In order to reflect the line of thinking and thus when future communication or ammendment easier when things really do change, would such renaming make sense? 2017年12月16日 03:20 於 "Garrett Wollman" <wollman@csail.mit.edu> 寫道：
Contrast the case (which thankfully we do not have to deal with) of the capital city of the People's Republic of China. In English, it used to be called "Peking", and in fact in the name of the university and of the duck dish it still is. The PRC government made a concerted campaign to change the name used by English speakers to be "Beijing", which is a phonetic representation of the name of the city in Mandarin (putonghua). This has to a very large extent worked, and now most English texts say "Beijing" and not "Peking" (although many people still don't pronounce it "correctly" because the letters in hanyu pinyin don't have the same sound values as they do in English). However, in many languages *other than English*, the name of the city has not changed -- AFAIK it's still "Pékin" in French, for example.
On 12/15/2017 01:13 PM, Phake Nick wrote:
after reading naming convention of zones, wouldn't it still be better to rename the zone to Asia/Beijing mowadays? As almost all users are referring to the zone as "Beijing Time"
No, just as we shouldn't rename America/Los_Angeles to America/Pacific merely because almost all users refer to its time as "Pacific Time". For better or worse, zone names are tied to the biggest city in the zone not to the English-language name for the time, as the latter is too often ambiguous.
On Dec 15, 2017, at 4:38 PM, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
On 12/15/2017 01:13 PM, Phake Nick wrote:
after reading naming convention of zones, wouldn't it still be better to rename the zone to Asia/Beijing mowadays? As almost all users are referring to the zone as "Beijing Time"
No, just as we shouldn't rename America/Los_Angeles to America/Pacific merely because almost all users refer to its time as "Pacific Time". For better or worse, zone names are tied to the biggest city in the zone not to the English-language name for the time, as the latter is too often ambiguous.
Also, IANA time zone names (Zone) are well established. Having them be relatively stable is an intrinsic part of the value of this database. There is a significant cost to change. Even the deletion of one little-used Link (not even a name) caused breakage recently. The names should not be set in concrete. But they should be set in stuff that’s pretty stiff. There needs to be a large benefit to change the name of a Zone to offset the cost. Migrating Zones to Links is a decent way to mitigate costs. Howard
participants (3)
-
Howard Hinnant -
Paul Eggert -
Phake Nick