Fwd: Proposal to rename zone.tab to region.tab
Retry, this didn't go through 2013-09-15, due to blocking by the time zone mailing list maintainer. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Tobias Conradi <mail.2012@tobiasconradi.com> Date: Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 12:29 PM Subject: Proposal to rename zone.tab to region.tab To: "tz@iana.org mailing list" <tz@iana.org> Proposal to rename ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/data/zone.tab to ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/data/region.tab Reason: ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/code/Theory says ----- Scope of the tz database ----- ... To represent this data, the world is partitioned into regions .... For each such region, the database records all known clock transitions, and labels the region ...... Uniquely identify every national region .... Indicate to humans as to where that region is. .... is the name of a specific location within that region. ..... Uninhabited regions like ..... If all the clocks in a region have agreed since 1970, .... even if subregions' clocks disagreed before 1970. ...... Use cities or small islands, not countries or regions, [! other meaning] ..... The file `zone.tab' lists the geographical locations used to name time zone rule files. It is intended to be an exhaustive list of names for geographic regions as described above. -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com
Tobias, This would be pointless screwing around with files that would just cause software to break. It's just a file name. Mark <https://google.com/+MarkDavis> *— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —* On Sun, Jul 20, 2014 at 5:07 AM, Tobias Conradi <tc@tobiasconradi.com> wrote:
Retry, this didn't go through 2013-09-15, due to blocking by the time zone mailing list maintainer.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Tobias Conradi <mail.2012@tobiasconradi.com> Date: Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 12:29 PM Subject: Proposal to rename zone.tab to region.tab To: "tz@iana.org mailing list" <tz@iana.org>
Proposal to rename ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/data/zone.tab to ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/data/region.tab
Reason: ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/code/Theory says
----- Scope of the tz database -----
... To represent this data, the world is partitioned into regions ....
For each such region, the database records all known clock transitions, and labels the region ...... Uniquely identify every national region .... Indicate to humans as to where that region is. .... is the name of a specific location within that region. ..... Uninhabited regions like ..... If all the clocks in a region have agreed since 1970, .... even if subregions' clocks disagreed before 1970. ...... Use cities or small islands, not countries or regions, [! other meaning] ..... The file `zone.tab' lists the geographical locations used to name time zone rule files. It is intended to be an exhaustive list of names for geographic regions as described above.
-- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany
-- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany
On Sun, 20 Jul 2014, Tobias Conradi wrote:
Proposal to rename ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/data/zone.tab to ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/data/region.tab
Reason: [...]
I agree that region.tab is a better name than zone.tab for this file. I'd expect a zone.tab to contain explicit information about all zones, whether or not they are implemented as links (for example, keeping Africa/Maputo and Africa/Harare as two separate zones), but this file groups zones into regions that have shared history, and reports only one representative zone for the entire region (for example, placing MZ and ZW in the same region). --apb (Alan Barrett)
Maybe the new time.tab could get the name region.tab. Reason: - it is a list of geographical regions - it is not a list of time At the same time there would be a better alignment between documentation (Theory-file) and file names. It would also address Mark Davis'
"screwing around with files that would just cause software to break. It's just a file name."
The old file zone.tab would be kept, and the file time.tab is new anyway. -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com
On 07/23/2014 09:03 AM, Tobias Conradi wrote:
Maybe the new time.tab could get the name region.tab. I take the point that the name 'time.tab' can be improved upon, but I'd like something better than 'region.tab'. The entries in time.tab are Zone IDs (in the sense of zic input files), and I'd rather not use a different word "region" to refer to what zic calls "zones".
The intent is that the new file contain one zone for each area where localtime clocks (including time zone abbreviations) have agreed since 1970. So perhaps 'zone-1970.tab' would be a better name.
Paul Eggert wrote:
The intent is that the new file contain one zone for each area where localtime clocks (including time zone abbreviations) have agreed since 1970. So perhaps 'zone-1970.tab' would be a better name.
No further comment, so I applied the attached patch. This drops the hyphen from the new name to make room for one more byte in case we have similar names in the future.
On Wed, 23 Jul 2014, Alan Barrett wrote:
On Sun, 20 Jul 2014, Tobias Conradi wrote:
Proposal to rename ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/data/zone.tab to ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/data/region.tab
Reason: [...]
I agree that region.tab is a better name than zone.tab for this file.
Sorry, I thought that I was supporting the idea of renaming the recently-introduced file, which is actually called time.tab, not zone.tab. For the file that has existed for many years, called zone.tab, I think that renaming it would be a bad idea. So I'd like to retract my support for the proposal to rename it. --apb (Alan Barrett)
participants (4)
-
Alan Barrett -
Mark Davis ☕️ -
Paul Eggert -
Tobias Conradi