[tz] Asia/Shanghai

[Howard Hinnant]

On Dec 15, 2017, at 4:38 PM, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> 
> On 12/15/2017 01:13 PM, Phake Nick wrote:
>> after reading naming convention of zones, wouldn't it still be better to rename the zone to Asia/Beijing mowadays? As almost all users are referring to the zone as "Beijing Time"
> 
> No, just as we shouldn't rename America/Los_Angeles to America/Pacific merely because almost all users refer to its time as "Pacific Time". For better or worse, zone names are tied to the biggest city in the zone not to the English-language name for the time, as the latter is too often ambiguous.
> 

Also, IANA time zone names (Zone) are well established.  Having them be relatively stable is an intrinsic part of the value of this database.  There is a significant cost to change.  Even the deletion of one little-used Link (not even a name) caused breakage recently.  The names should not be set in concrete.  But they should be set in stuff that’s pretty stiff.  There needs to be a large benefit to change the name of a Zone to offset the cost.  Migrating Zones to Links is a decent way to mitigate costs.

Howard

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