proposed time zone package changes (Russia, Curacao)

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Fri, 17 Jun 2011 10:11:27 -0400
    From:        Paul Koning <paul_koning at Dell.com>
    Message-ID:  <97E1DB35-DB6F-4E61-AD2E-39C0664554F2 at dell.com>

  | That's my point.  Countries, or their subdivisions, are political
  | constructs.  The claim was made that cities were preferred for zone
  | names precisely because they are *not* political constructs, and I was
  | pointing out that this may be true but would actually be an argument
  | against city names.

No, it isn't.   Certainly timezones are political, and consequently
we bound all timezones by (at worst) their enclosing country (and in
some cases state or province).

But for naming them, a name that relates to something more stable than
countries is good, and for that (especially given that we sometimes
need multiple zones per country, so country names themselves are
certainly not adequate) city names serve well.  While it (kind of)
happens sometimes that a city spans timezones, things like that are
very very rare just because of the human inconvenience such a thing
causes.

kre