[tz] Suggestion for addition of America/Brasilia entry to time zone database

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Mon Oct 17 06:14:28 UTC 2016


Gabriel Gaspar via tz wrote:
> I have always wondered why it is that Brasilia is not listed as one
> of the time zones in the data base for South America.

This is covered in the Theory file, which says, "Use the most populous among 
locations in a zone, e.g. prefer 'Shanghai' to 'Beijing'.  Among locations with 
similar populations, pick the best-known location, e.g. prefer 'Rome' to 'Milan'."

In this respect Brazil is treated like other countries. In China, for example, 
although standard time is popularly called "北京时间" ("Beijing time"), the 
corresponding Zone name is Asia/Shanghai because Shanghai is the largest city in 
the region.

The intent is that Zone names be English-language city labels rather than 
localized time zone names. For the latter, please see the CLDR project 
<http://cldr.unicode.org/>.


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