[tz] Proposal for a modern 'Collapsed' Namespace

[Walter]

>>> Yes, CLDR has what you need.
>> It doesn't.  It doesn't have timezone names, nor the capacity to
>> collapse historically accrued timezones (with near-zero interest to
>> modern users) ...
> You're making an unwarranted and unsupported generalization.  The fact that this information is not interesting to you doesn't mean it isn't interesting to others.
>
> If you want to filter timezone data to compress out the parts you don't care about, go right ahead. It's a small matter of programming once you know what you need.

True, but for maintenance purposes I try not to go too far out on a
limb for such basic components... I had assumed tz would solve the
'reasonable list of timezones in current use' issue.  Since tz
apparently considers it out of scope, then the only real solution for
our project's requirements appears to be ICU.  This seems slightly
obtuse, but is perfectly workable.

Interestingly though, perhaps because unlike the tz database, ICU's
focus is not that of providing a timezone database, at least some of
the ICU bindings in other languages do not appear to provide any way
to list available timezones (apparently provided by 'enumerate'
functionality within ICU).

*sigh*

That one can be worked around, but in this day and age, so many hoops
for such a fundamental dataset seems a little saddening.

2-bit notion of the email: perhaps the tz maintainers could recognize
the problems with the current Olson IDs and consider a policy of
importing aliases from the 'meta:' namespace within ICU without the
associated multilingual names baggage?

- Walter