[tz] Dropping iso3166.tab

Stephen Colebourne scolebourne at joda.org
Tue May 21 09:57:36 UTC 2013


On 21 May 2013 05:34, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> (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.

I think this in particular is bonkers.

While politics is hard and can cause debate, its an essential part of
time-zones. Time-zone rules are, by their very nature, political.
States, proto-states and political areas really do matter.

It should be the goal of the database, and the maintainer, to simply
follow what happens with time definitions. It will necessarily involve
some annoyance - which city is biggest, which area is appropriate to
define the rules for - but there are other organizations like to UN
and CLDR to fall back on for the politics.

BTW, I still think that CLDR is a much better home for this data as
they have more formal structures and certainties about managing
change.

Stephen


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