America/Edmonton and other zone naming issues

[Paul Schauble]

We actually might be able to do that in the US. As far as I know, all of
these zone changes are done by country. The only exceptions I know of in
the states where incorporated cities are more or less equivalent to
counties.

So we might have
  America/Indiana/Pulaski		Pulaski County
  America/Arizona
  America/Navajo				Navajo reservation, or
America/Dineh

If we made links for America/<State>/<Jurisdiction> to whatever was
right, we would cover 99.9% of these changes without people needing to
change the name they use.
<Jurisdiction> is usually county, but could be an incorporated city or
an indian nation, or a few other things.

I think the real need, though, is to tie the zone name to the
jurisdiction making the change, and not to pick an arbitrary city as a
proxy for the deciding jurisdiction. Where an entire state follows the
same rules, don't create the county level. 

Just for reference, the US has
	3,007 entities named "County"
	16 Boroughs in Alaska
	11 Census Areas in Alaska (for areas not organized into Boroughs
by the State)
	64 Parishes in Louisiana
	42 Independent Cities (1 in Maryland, 1 in Missouri, 1 in
Nevada, and the 	remainder in Virginia)
	1 District - the Federal District or District of Columbia.


-----Original Message-----
From: tz-request at elsie.nci.nih.gov [mailto:tz-request at elsie.nci.nih.gov]
On Behalf Of Mark Davis
Sent: Wednesday, February 08, 2006 8:23 AM
To: tz at lecserver.nci.nih.gov
Cc: tz at lecserver.nci.nih.gov
Subject: Re: America/Edmonton and other zone naming issues

What would be even better would be physical boundaries for each given
zone. Right now, within multi-zone countries, the timezone database
alone is insufficient to determine the behavior of any given city (or
other location).

Mark