Proposal 1) Define what territory an IANA zone covers 2) Include the definition in the documentation 3) Enforce the definition If there would be a definition that territories that use different abbreviations shall have different zones, then the merger On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 8:41 PM, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

Alan Barrett wrote:

...

To the best of my knowledge, most other African countries that share the same UTC offset do not use the abbreviation "SAST" Thanks for catching this; this was indeed an error in the merge,

would have violated 3). Is it really true, that starting 2014-07-10 IANA zones are created based on acronym observation? Also "coincidence" as in On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 8:39 PM, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

This is a good point, and in some cases in hindsight I went too far in merging zones that were coincidentally the same would need definition, if one really wants to base territorial extension of IANA zones on such a vaguely defined concept which can lead to decision that may look arbitrary.

And arbitrary seems to be the other rule:

This is not a question about optimizing the implementation; it's a question of having the tz data reflect our knowledge as accurately as the current format allows. The current format allows to have at least one zone per post-1970 ISO 3166 country and having this would allow to more accurately "reflect our knowledge", namely for abbreviations and for laws.

Laws are the main source for observation of a specific standard time in any country. So one could think the territory covered by an IANA zone would at least be a subset of the territory of exactly one jurisdiction named a country in ISO 3166. If acronym observation and "coincidence" are the basis of zoning, I propose to include that in the documentation. -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com/