[tz] OpenJDK/CLDR/ICU/Joda issues with Ireland change

Robert Elz kre at munnari.OZ.AU
Fri Jan 26 20:32:38 UTC 2018


  From: "Yoshito Umaoka" <yoshito_umaoka at us.ibm.com>
  Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2018 14:32:49 -0500
  Subject: Re: [tz] OpenJDK/CLDR/ICU/Joda issues with Ireland change

  | The goal of CLDR is to provide names that people in a locale
  | can reasonably understand - and standard/daylight
  | names requires that people can distinguish one from another.

Why?  What is the motivation for that?

In real life, I see just the opposite - for better or worse, I get
to see a fair amount of US sport on TV, and during that (never to
ignore a commercial opportunity) there are often ads for other
programs (which are generally not available here...) and from what
I can see they are always advertised as being at 9 ET / 8 CT
(or whatever) - that is, just "eastern time" with no mention
of an S or a D.

"Why would that be?"  someone might ask...

Because in practice no-one cares - all that matters is what time
should a viewer switch on the TV to the relevant channel if they
want to watch.   That is, a sync between the event and wall
clock time.   What offset it happens to be from UTC this week,
and whether it will be the same offset next week, is irrelevant.

This is not to say that knowing the offsets is useless, there
are applications for that .. it is just that the end user mostly
does not care, and the long/short names don't seem to have any
other use than to be presented to end users.   After all, CLDR,
one application you'd think would make use of the names that
exist (without its versions) doesn't even bother to use tzdb's
names - choosing instead to simply ignore them.   If this
applocation prefers to find some other way, how could be expect
that any other would be different?

The time zone is only mentioned in US ads because the US is a country
with multipe zones, and with synchronised broadcasts, the clock time
will be different in different regions.  In countries without that,
there is normally (from my observation) nothing more than the time.
I suspect it is probably like that in Japan too, isn't it?

That is why I asked for an example of something real, where the
timezone information is actually used for some real practical
purpose (just displaying it because we have it does not count.)

So far (and I know it has not been very long) there has been nothing.

  | "generic" name is not in TZ db database.

You're right, it isn't, and perhaps should be.   For all
zones, the relevant (English) string is probably "Time"
(abbreviation, "T").

kre



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