[tz] Adding Asia/Beijing timezone into the database

[Daoming Qiu]

One example of the user of the tz database is Oracle JDK(Java Dev Kit).
Currently Java applications will get the time zone IDs  from the tz database.
So if you call java.util.TimeZone.getTimeZone("Asia/Beijing"), it will
fail in current impl.
calling java.util.TimeZone.getTimeZone("Asia/Shanghai") works.
But for Java developers, using "Asia/Beijing" is more friendly.

On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 2:17 AM, Guy Harris <guy at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>
> On Dec 9, 2011, at 2:37 AM, Daoming Qiu wrote:
>
>> Thanks for all your information.
>>
>> The fact that this issue has been discussed so many times reflects
>> that what the user prefers,
>
> Who are the "users" of the time zone database?
>
> The time zone names are not intended to be directly presented to users other than UN*X command-line users who are directly setting the TZ environment variable.
>
>> I browsed through the list archive, and I don't agree with the discussion point.
>> - The timezones listed in the tz database are important and directly
>> referenced by many kinds of applications.
>> Requiring applications to do specific mapping (Asia/Shanghai->
>> Beijing)  is not good.
>
> So would the applications instead have to map Shanghai to Asia/Beijing?  In *either* case, they have to map, say, Guangzhou to some other city's name, so there's still mapping.
>
> There should perhaps be a database or databases that can be used to map, say, city names, province/county/etc. names (at least in cases where all of the province/county/etc. is covered by a single tz database entry), latitude/longitude values, etc. to tz database entry names.  Perhaps there should also be a database giving names to tz database entries for human use - to use your earlier example, "Beijing, Chongqing, HongKong, Urumuqi" for Asia/{whatever city is used}, although not all systems would choose the same scheme to describe the region covered by a database entry (Mac OS X has a large list of "nearest cities").
>
> Perhaps we should just assign UUIDs to the tz database entries; that should eliminate any complaints about the wrong name being chosen for a database entry. :-)