Time zone suggestions for draft-ietf-calsch-ical-08.txt

[Antoine Leca]

Markus Kuhn wrote:
> 
> Keith Moore <moore at cs.utk.edu> wrote on 1998-08-08:
> >    (Offhand, I'm thinking in terms of /XX or /XX/yyy where XX
> >    is the iso 3166 country code and yyy is a political subdivision
> >    within that country.  In many cases just /XX suffices.
> 
> I don't know whether you already know that there exists a
> new ISO 3166-2 draft standard, which defines ISO alpha codes for
> regional subdivisions within countries (e.g., the states in US and the
> bundesländer in DE):

As Paul explained, this might be inappropriate.
For example, the finest degree for Indiana according to ISO DIS 3166-2
is US-IN, and this does not accord with current practice.

OTOH, there is Europe or the Western Indies... take a look below!


> I agree that naming a time zone after the most populated city within
> that time zone is a very flexible and sound approach. The only thing
> that irritates me about the Olson/Eggert tz names is that they are all
> prefixed by the continent name, which I feel is redundant information.
> Is there really a good rationale why it has to be "Europe/Berlin" for
> the German time zone and not just "Berlin".

First, I should say that I see no reason to invent a new scheme:
better to not always reinvent the wheel!

Well, my problem is that, *in the view of the iCalendar protocol*,
adding a different entry for each country may be an unnecessary burden.

So I think that the CET (or MEZ) timezone ought to be named "/Paris"
(or "/Berlin", if Berlin is more populated than Paris), instead as the
current count:
	Africa/Ceuta
	Arctic/Longyearbyen
	Europe/Amsterdam
	Europe/Andorra
	Europe/Belgrade
	Europe/Berlin
	Europe/Bratislava
	Europe/Brussels
	Europe/Budapest
	Europe/Copenhagen
	Europe/Gibraltar
	Europe/Ljubljana
	Europe/Luxembourg
	Europe/Madrid
	Europe/Malta
	Europe/Monaco
	Europe/Oslo
	Europe/Paris
	Europe/Prague
	Europe/Rome
	Europe/San_Marino
	Europe/Sarajevo
	Europe/Skopje
	Europe/Stockholm
	Europe/Tirane
	Europe/Vaduz
	Europe/Vatican
	Europe/Vienna
	Europe/Warsaw (currently questionable)
	Europe/Zagreb
	Europe/Zurich
to a grand total of 31 entries!


Please note that Keith pointed out the number of aliases in the tz
database. Paul's answer lead me to think he understood it as the
concept of "Link" that is here for backward compatibility reasons.
But links are easy to skip; this is not the same game when one has
to identify "Europe/London" and "Europe/Lisbon", that have very
different history as timezones, but that are now equal, and also
equal in the foreseable future.
I believe that we should try to keep a minimum number of timezones,
at least to not have to worry small implementations, and
to keep the requirements on network traffic as small as possible.


Antoine