[tz] Proposal to change Macquarie Island to be Australian territory

Guy Harris guy at alum.mit.edu
Thu Apr 18 18:11:33 UTC 2013


On Apr 18, 2013, at 11:01 AM, random832 at fastmail.us wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 18, 2013, at 13:58, Guy Harris wrote:
>> Presumably by "understand" you mean "have a file with the appropriate
>> pathname"; I don't think software should "understand" the identifiers
>> except by using them to construct pathnames of Olson-database files to
>> load - it shouldn't "know" the pathname syntax or "know" what particular
>> values of particular components of the pathname "mean".
> 
> The timezone identifier is used as a key in other databases, such as
> CLDR (whose maintainers have, IIRC, declined to recognize any changes
> made to the identifiers used for existing timezones)

Perhaps both databases should be using the same LOCODE-derived identifiers as the "official" identifiers, with all the region/city names used as legacy backwards-compatibility names?  Using those as the "official" identifiers has the advantages that:

	1) they look like line noise to humans, so UIs for setting the zone will perhaps make an effort to do something better than offer you a choice of zone identifiers or zone identifiers with underscores replaced by spaces;

	2) they look like line noise to humans, so perhaps people won't get quite as bent out of shape because The Wrong City was used;

	3) they look like line noise to humans, so perhaps people won't get quite as bent out of shape because The Wrong Region was used;

	4) advantages 2 and 3 mean they won't have to change over time;

	5) advantage 4 might mean that the CLDR folks won't have to worry about identifier changes.




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