[tz] [PATCH 4/4] yellow flags

[Zoidsoft]

Shouldn't the standard be correct time?  If politics can assert influence
to the point where it breaks the code, then I think bowing to political
pressure should be avoided.  Politicians do all sorts of stupid things.  A
friend of mine who was a chemical engineer once told me about the
foolishness of an EPA lawyer who once said that a pH of 7.0 wasn't low
enough saying... "If you can get it down to 7, why can't you get it down to
zero?".


On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 12:04 AM, <random832 at fastmail.us> wrote:

>
> On Tue, Aug 13, 2013, at 17:32, Paul Eggert wrote:
> > enh wrote:
> > > Android currently uses zone.tab to get a list of time
> > > zones in use in a given country.
> >
> > Yes, as does tzselect (which is in the tz code).
> > This continues to work with the proposed changes:
> > zone.tab still lists all time zones in use in a
> > given country, and every entry in that list continues
> > to work.
>
> The problem is, most tools that use it list city names, and that is not
> likely to change.
>
> > Marc Lehmann wrote:
> > > reducing the quality of the tz distribution(s)
> > > (which were beyond outstanding) for political
> > > reasons
> >
> > No real reduction in quality is being proposed.
> > There's no significant difference in behavior between
> > the current and proposed data.
>
> ----
>
> What happened here is _you_ made a blunder in 1995, by rigidly applying
> the "most populated city" rule [ignoring the principle of leaving small
> violations like a hypothetical Rome vs Milan alone] to a city you
> believed was the most populated one in the region while ignorant of the
> dispute as to whether, in fact, it is in the region.
>
> This went unnoticed for a while, and when it was pointed out, you
> covered for it by trying to turn "politics" into a massive bogeyman
> rather than going for the simple non-disruptive solution of causing the
> database to once again not comment on the status of Jerusalem.
>
> The idea that no reduction in quality is being proposed is ridiculous.
> The reality of the fact that country codes and city names are listed
> alongside each other by the vast majority of tools that use zone.tab
> should not be ignored. And politics is not a significant enough issue
> often enough to justify completely destroying the "Each region is only
> in one country" rule rather than simply avoiding naming them after
> cities in disputed border regions.
>
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