[tz] Proposal for a modern 'Collapsed' Namespace

[Guy Harris]

On Oct 12, 2012, at 5:42 PM, Mark Davis ☕ <mark at macchiato.com> wrote:

> I think that is a matter of terminology. In CLDR we call "Americas/New_York" an ID (not a name), since it is an internal identifier, and shouldn't be shown to users. A "name" is something you'd show to a user, like "New York Zeit" or "Nordamerikanische Ostküstenzeit" for a German user, or "Восточно-американское время" for a Russian user.

...or "Eastern Standard Time" or "US Eastern Standard Time" for a US user and perhaps the latter even for other English-speaking users, i.e. "Americas/New_York" is not even intended to be the Official Display Name For Users for *English-speaking* users.

An ID can even refer to more than one "time zone" in the sense of, for example, "Eastern Standard Time", if a given location moved between "time zones" in that sense.  To quote a comment in the northamerica file:

# Daviess, Dubois, Knox, and Martin Counties, Indiana,
# switched from eastern to central time in April 2006, then switched back
# in November 2007.

so the ID America/Indiana/Vincennes does *NOT* map to any single "time zone" in the sense of "Eastern Standard Time" or "Central Standard Time"; it isn't intended to do so, and it should not do so, as the idea is that a machine in those counties running an OS using the tz database should be configured for America/Indiana/Vincennes and, if the tz database is kept up-to-date on it, the configuration would *not* have to have been changed in April 2006 or November 2007.