[tz] Dropping iso3166.tab

Christos Zoulas christos at zoulas.com
Tue May 21 11:33:53 UTC 2013


On May 21, 11:37am, zefram at fysh.org (Zefram) wrote:
-- Subject: Re: [tz] Dropping iso3166.tab

| Paul Eggert wrote:
| >I have been thinking of proposing to drop iso3166.tab from the
| >tz distribution, and to drop all uses of country codes.
| >This would help simplify maintenance, as it would mean
| >that the database would be unaffected by political
| >issues such as whether Kosovo is a country,
| 
| The association of time zones with countries is useful, despite the
| somewhat fuzzy and occasionally contentious nature of country boundaries.
| It is, of course, entirely proper that the notion of "country" doesn't
| influence the zone naming scheme, for many more reasons than any present
| controversy about country status.  Segregating the country/zone link data
| into a separate file, with its own update mechanism, was a wise choice.

I totally agree. We should not remove the country-timezone association;
it has been there for a long time and it is useful. The iso3166
list of countries is the de-facto standard used everywhere (in
website list of countries for example). Ignoring it does not make
us apolitical, it makes us bending over the pressure from a few
highly politically-biased semi-anonymous folks.

christos


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