[tz] Proposal to use Asia/Tel_Aviv for Israel - Jerusalem is not internationally recognized as part of Israel

Alan Barrett apb at cequrux.com
Wed May 8 08:52:11 UTC 2013


On Tue, 07 May 2013, random832 at fastmail.us wrote:
> At the risk of annoying people by continuing this discussion, 
> I'm confused what the supposed cost of this change actually 
> is.

I had not noticed, until your message, that there was already an 
Asia/Tel_Aviv zone, so I had incorrectly assumed that changing 
the representative city for Israel would be more costly.  I 
suspect that some of the objections were derived from a similar 
misunderstanding.

> Both names already exist in the database, which makes it even 
> less of a cost than renaming a timezone (and leaving an alias 
> behind) usually has.

Given that there's a dispute about whether or not the city of 
Jerusalem is in the country of Israel, I think it would be 
sensible to avoid using Jerusalem as the representative city for 
Israel's timezone.

Given that there is already an Asia/Tel_Aviv zone, with identical 
data to the Asia/Jerusalem zone (implemented via a "Link" 
directive in the input data), and that there is no dispute about 
whether or not Tel Aviv is in Israel, and that Tel Aviv is the 
largest city in the undisputed part of Israel, I think it would be 
reasonable to use Tel Aviv as the representative city for Israel's 
timezone.

Accordingly, I suggest:

* Reverse the direction of the link, making Asia/Tel_Aviv the
   primary name and making Asia/Jerusalem a link to it.

* Use Asia/Tel_Aviv instead of Asia/Jerusalem in zone.tab.

--apb (Alan Barrett)


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