Proposal to add America/Quito as a link to America/Guayaquil in the 'southamerica' file
Dear TZ Coordinators and community, I would like to formally propose adding 'America/Quito' as a Link to 'America/Guayaquil' in the 'southamerica' data file. While I understand the database policy of minimizing redundancy for regions with identical UTC offset history since 1970, the exclusion of Quito causes significant friction for end-users. In almost all modern Linux distributions and open-source installers, users in Ecuador are forced to select "Guayaquil" as their geographic anchor, creating confusion since Quito is the nation's capital and the administrative center. Geopolitically and historically, Quito holds the legal custody of the national time. According to Ecuadorian legislation, the "Observatorio Astronómico de Quito" (OAO), founded in 1873 and located in the capital, is the official institution responsible for calculating and broadcasting the official time for the entire continental territory (Ecuador Time - ECT, UTC-5). Adding a link would align Ecuador's representation with neighboring South American countries where capitals are systematically used as canonical zone names or main entry points (e.g., America/Bogota, America/Lima). Therefore, I suggest adding the following line to the 'southamerica' file: Link America/Guayaquil America/Quito Thank you very much for your time, consideration, and your continuous maintenance of the global time zone database. Best regards, Byron Valdivieso AndradeQuito - Ecuador
On 2026-06-07 13:59, Byron Valdivieso via tz wrote:
In almost all modern Linux distributions and open-source installers, users in Ecuador are forced to select "Guayaquil" as their geographic anchor, creating confusion since Quito is the nation's capital and the administrative center.
Even in 'tzselect', the simple text selector that comes with TZDB, by default users select "Americas" then "Ecuador" then "Ecuador (mainland)", so there's little confusion there. And most Linux distributions have a map-based selector that is similarly unambiguous. Also, Ecuador's users are not that unusual: nearly half the world's population lives in countries like Brazil and the US whose capitals lack TZDB Zone names. We've long had a guideline of sticking to the name of the most populous among locations in a region[1], and it's not clear that Ecuador should be an exception. [1]: https://data.iana.org/time-zones/theory.html#naming
participants (2)
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Byron Valdivieso -
Paul Eggert