[tz] [PATCH 0/1] Add Asia/Beijing

[Guy Harris]

On Aug 13, 2012, at 2:25 PM, David Patte ₯ wrote:

> Geonames.org only specifies offsets as of Jan 1st and July 1st, so it is not very usable for accurate timezone info, but it does use the Olson tz database names. My own product, Time Zone Master, uses the place names and zone names in geonames.org to determine the zone,

...which exactly what's being discussed here - finding a way to map locations to time zone names, so that the time zone names can be treated solely as geek-friendly strings.  As you indicate, the geonames.org database would suffice for that function; we're not talking about using it to convert UTC to local time, we're just talking about using it to determine the appropriate Olson time zone name for a location.

> but then uses the tz database to determine accurate timezone data.

...which is what the systems being talked about here (various Un*x systems) do (use the tz database for the localtime() and mktime() APIs).