Unable to find Doha in the database
Dear Time Zone Database folks, Visiting Doha, I wanted to change to its time zone, and knowing `Europe/Berlin`, I looked for *Doha*, but didn’t find it in GNOME [1]. Looking through the Time Zone Database archive, there is in `asia` [3]: # Bahrain # Qatar # Zone NAME STDOFF RULES FORMAT [UNTIL] Zone Asia/Qatar 3:26:08 - LMT 1920 # Al Dawhah / Doha 4:00 - %z 1972 Jun 3:00 - %z The comment is not in my file on Debian though in `/usr/share/zoneinfo/tzdata.zi` from *tzdata* 2025c-3. Z Asia/Qatar 3:26:8 - LMT 1920 4 - %z 1972 Jun 3 - %z Of course, I do not know, if the comment would change anything. Would it be possible to also add Qatar’s capital to the database. Or is there another way to make it easier for people to find the right time zone entry? Kind regards, Paul [1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/issues/3656 [2]: https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/d5f71488fd1ec4a2f7166ceeac2024a677daaaef/a...
On Wed, 14 Jan 2026 at 19:02, Paul Menzel via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
I looked for *Doha*, but didn’t find it in GNOME [1]. Looking through the Time Zone Database archive, there is in `asia` [3]:
# Bahrain # Qatar # Zone NAME STDOFF RULES FORMAT [UNTIL] Zone Asia/Qatar 3:26:08 - LMT 1920 # Al Dawhah / Doha 4:00 - %z 1972 Jun 3:00 - %z
The zone ID for Doha is indeed named Asia/Qatar, as you found. There are other places named Doha <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doha_(disambiguation)> in Asia, so the name "Qatar" was chosen to avoid ambiguity. This principle is applied in a few other places as well — for example, America/Puerto_Rico instead of "San Juan" and America/Miquelon instead of "St Pierre". is there another way to make it easier for people to find the right time
zone entry?
In general, we continue to recommend that end-users use a tool like our tzselect or something similar packaged in their operating system to help find the proper zone ID, rather than perusing through tzdata source code directly. -- Tim Parenti
On Thu, 15 Jan 2026 at 00:57, Tim Parenti via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
On Wed, 14 Jan 2026 at 19:02, Paul Menzel via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
I looked for *Doha*, but didn’t find it in GNOME [1]. Looking through the Time Zone Database archive, there is in `asia` [3]:
# Bahrain # Qatar # Zone NAME STDOFF RULES FORMAT [UNTIL] Zone Asia/Qatar 3:26:08 - LMT 1920 # Al Dawhah / Doha 4:00 - %z 1972 Jun 3:00 - %z
The zone ID for Doha is indeed named Asia/Qatar, as you found. There are other places named Doha in Asia, so the name "Qatar" was chosen to avoid ambiguity.
This principle is applied in a few other places as well — for example, America/Puerto_Rico instead of "San Juan" and America/Miquelon instead of "St Pierre".
is there another way to make it easier for people to find the right time zone entry?
In general, we continue to recommend that end-users use a tool like our tzselect or something similar packaged in their operating system to help find the proper zone ID, rather than perusing through tzdata source code directly.
See https://data.iana.org/time-zones/theory.html#naming GNOME should be mapping the time zone names to user-friendly names. Unfortunately, most UIs fail to do this and only expose the names from the underlying raw data set.
participants (3)
-
Jonathan Wakely -
Paul Menzel -
Tim Parenti