[tz] Dropping iso3166.tab

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Tue May 21 04:34:11 UTC 2013


On 05/20/2013 05:10 PM, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:

> Perhaps iso3166.tab can be separated out into its own distribution.

Thanks, that's a good idea.  Let me try to flesh it out.
We can do something like the following:

(1) Remove iso3166.tab.  Others can take up its maintenance if they like.

(2) Say that zone.tab's column 1 is a comment, present only for backwards
    compatibility, and with no information as far as the tz database
    is concerned.  We can describe the backward-compatibility issue
    in a comment, and mention that the contents of column 1 do not imply
    an official position or endorsement of any territorial claims.

(3) Merge all Zones that are currently split only because of
    national boundaries.  For example, merge Africa/Bangui,
    Africa/Brazzaville, etc., into Africa/Lagos, since these zones
    have all had the same clocks since 1970.  We would of course
    retain backward-compatibility links for the merged zones, so
    they'd continue to work.

The point of (2) is that the installers for FreeBSD, Ubuntu, etc.
could continue to use zone.tab unmodified.  Our installer, tzselect,
can easily be modified to ignore column 1, so that we'd be eating our
own dog food.



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