Dear Pavel (I suspect, that this is your real given name and you use Paul only because it's more popular ;-) ), Thank you for your answer. I'm sure, you know better what to do. Thanks for supporting TZ database all this time. As always, you do your best. I just would like to share my incentive to appeal. Maybe Kiev is more popular for exUSSR population and the rest of the world (because the Russian language is more popular, and, as you know, 'Kiev' is a transliteration from russian 'Киев' and 'Kyiv' is the transliteration from ukrainian 'Київ'), however, as a Ukrainian, I feel irritated every time when I have to choose my timezone and see the wrong spelling (in my country we have the only one official language, it's Ukrainian and, e.g. all road signs, IDs and official documents use transliteration from Ukrainian, not from Russian). P.S. Even the United Nations and the Orthodox Church are less conservative than TZ. It's a little bit funny, however, you definitely have all the rights to make decisions and, I'm sure, think of the tz customers first. :) https://www.unian.info/society/10381359-holy-see-recognizes-orthodox-church-... https://unstats.un.org/unsd/geoinfo/UNGEGN/docs/10th-uncsgn-docs/econf/E_CON... Probably we, Ukrainians, living in the Kyiv time zone, should wait until the Ukrainian language becomes more popular than Russian all other the world. чт, 9 мая 2019 г. в 08:01, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>:

Vitaliy Stavropolskiy wrote:

...

Maybe it's time to change the spelling of Ukrainian cities <https://mfa.gov.ua/en/page/open/id/5418>?

No, let's be more patient. Although one can find many sources that say "Kyiv", in English "Kiev" is still by far more popular, and even if the popularity were even we wouldn't switch until "Kyiv" became the clear winner. Transitions like these take many years, as a rule.

-- С уважением, Виталий Ставропольский +380675706029

I just realized my reply before was just to the original email. I will quote it below, but one of the things I ran into was searching for Kiev on the Guardian's website still returns old news stories, and advertisements so it looks like there has been no news for Kiev for over a year. When sites make the change, they should link for searching the previous usage. Also it was transliterated from both Ukrainian and Russian to Kiev until new transliteration guidelines were published by the government in the early 1990's, and the Ukrainian government started using it in 1995. Here is my previous reply: What you see picking your time zone in an app or operating system is set by

that app or operating system downstream of tzdb. For example America/Los_Angeles is replaced by a different city in the time zone on many systems. You also don't see the underscore in many apps. Just like they can omit the underscore or use a different city name, individual apps and operating systems could use Kyiv. When procuring computers your government could request or require in the contract that the vendor follow the governments naming convention. This can lead to the change carrying over to consumer software/hardware from the same vendors.

When a change is made to tzdb, it can potentially break every system

downstream of it. It makes more sense for systems downstream to change. Examples go both ways. Yes, the Guardian has changed it in their style guide. That change was less than a year ago, and their search should link the two spellings. Otherwise it might look like nothing news worthy from the Ukraine if you search their site. The site search brought up several ads for travel to Kiev or Kiev hotels. The most recent usage was just less than a year ago - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/29/russian-journalist-arkady-babc... BBC is using Kiev still in a news story as of today - https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/48206280 NY Times used Kiev on May 1 is another story - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/politics/biden-son-ukraine.html I didn't go past the paywall to see which one the WSJ used - https://blogs.wsj.com/frontiers/2019/04/28/this-week-on-the-frontiers-9 but was presented with an ad for a travel site advertising Kiev hotel bookings. Unlike the Guardian it wasn't in the search results, but it did appear on the page. Washington Post - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/07/us-ambassador-ukraine-is-... In addition to comparing google results, I think those news organizations have a fairly wide readership and make a decent benchmark. The majority appear to still be using Kiev.

On Fri, May 10, 2019 at 3:56 PM Lester Caine <lester@lsces.uk> wrote:

On 09/05/2019 07:07, Vitaliy Stavropolskiy wrote:

...

Maybe Kiev is more popular for exUSSR population and the rest of the world

This is something of a chicken and egg problem. If every system use of Kiev was replaced with Kyiv then the 'popularity' may change, but it will result in problems with linking to other well established uses of Kiev in the rest of the system. Dictating something happens is not the best was of making it happen. Feet and pounds have not been 'the standard' in the UK since 1965 and various bans have come and gone yet even young people will still use imperial units today. And here in the UK Kiev is still Kiev ;)

In terms of translating names from one base to another, hindsight is a wonderful thing and perhaps it would have been better if the rules stored in TZ had been identified by numbers from the start which is the other solution to this problem that keeps bubbling up, but the current identification tags are used everywhere to PROVIDE links to all sorts of other translations and continually changing them does nothing to keep the underlying base stable hence the general consensus to maintain the status quo INTERNALLY. But again people are now entrenched using the TZ names in a way they are not intended to be use.

-- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - https://lsces.uk/wiki/Contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - https://lsces.uk Model Engineers Digital Workshop - https://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - https://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk

On 2019-05-09 00:07, Vitaliy Stavropolskiy wrote:

...

чт, 9 мая 2019 г. в 08:01, Paul Eggert: Vitaliy Stavropolskiy wrote:

...

Maybe it's time to change the spelling of Ukrainian cities <https://mfa.gov.ua/en/page/open/id/5418>? No, let's be more patient. Although one can find many sources that say "Kyiv", in English "Kiev" is still by far more popular, and even if the popularity were even we wouldn't switch until "Kyiv" became the clear winner. Transitions like these take many years, as a rule.

Dear Pavel (I suspect, that this is your real given name and you use Paul only because it's more popular ;-) ), Thank you for your answer. I'm sure, you know better what to do. Thanks for supporting TZ database all this time. As always, you do your best.

I just would like to share my incentive to appeal.   Maybe Kiev is more popular for exUSSR population and the rest of the world (because the Russian language is more popular, and, as you know, 'Kiev' is a transliteration from russian 'Киев' and 'Kyiv' is the transliteration from ukrainian 'Київ'), however, as a Ukrainian, I feel irritated every time when I have to choose my timezone and see the wrong spelling (in my country we have the only one official language, it's Ukrainian and, e.g. all road signs, IDs and official documents use transliteration from Ukrainian, not from Russian).

P.S. Even the United Nations and the Orthodox Church are less conservative than TZ. It's a little bit funny, however, you definitely have all the rights to make decisions and, I'm sure, think of the tz customers first. :) https://www.unian.info/society/10381359-holy-see-recognizes-orthodox-church-... https://unstats.un.org/unsd/geoinfo/UNGEGN/docs/10th-uncsgn-docs/econf/E_CON...  Probably we, Ukrainians, living in the Kyiv time zone, should wait until the Ukrainian language becomes more popular than Russian all other the world.

It will likely take more than another 30 years from Ukrainian independence before English use of, possibly major cultural influences, Kievan Rus and Chicken Kiev, is reduced in writings. -- Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada This email may be disturbing to some readers as it contains too much technical detail. Reader discretion is advised.

I see your point and thanks all for the explanation of how it should work. The main idea, as I understood, that software vendors haven't to use internal tzdb keys in UI. And I understand that it's hard to change keys. I have started communication with software vendors, but they often refer to the tz database, that's why I posted a proposal. Tweeter, for example, changed Kiev to Kyiv after long convictions. It's hard to persuade others, as they refer to the tz. It seems to me that this database not only a mirror of popularity and history, but it also influences others a lot and, in fact, creates rules even for new software. However, now it's more clear how it works, thanks. сб, 11 мая 2019 г. в 03:10, Pierpaolo Bernardi <olopierpa@gmail.com>:

On Thu, May 9, 2019 at 8:08 AM Vitaliy Stavropolskiy <stavvit@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Maybe Kiev is more popular for exUSSR population and the rest of the world (because the Russian language is more popular, and, as you know, 'Kiev' is a transliteration from russian 'Киев' and 'Kyiv' is the transliteration from ukrainian 'Київ'), however, as a Ukrainian, I feel irritated every time when I have to choose my timezone and see the wrong spelling (in my country we have the only one official language, it's Ukrainian and, e.g. all road signs, IDs and official documents use transliteration from Ukrainian, not from Russian).

This is not different from almost every other zone in the database. I feel irritated every time when I have to choose my timezone and see the wrong spelling (in my country we have the only one official language[*], it's Italian and, e.g. all road signs, IDs and official documents are written in Italian, not English). Still, my time zone is called Rome in the TZ database, instead of the correct Roma.

By the way, since we are on the subject, I suppose that in all Ukrainian documents the name of my city is written as Рома, not Рим. Is this correct? if not, then please fix all those mistakes, thank you.

(Please excuse my jokes. I understand that your irritation is exarcebated by the currently poor relations between UA and RU, but still you have no right to dictate how speakers of a foreign language should call your cities. Also, as has been discussed many times in this mailing list, time zone names are not supposed to be shown to end users. If your user interface language is Ukrainian and you are shown "Kiev", than that's a bug in the software you are using, not in the TZ database).

Cheers P.

[*] Actually we have a bunch of official languages, but English is not one of them.

-- Best regards, Vitalii