[tz] Asia\Nicosia

[Paul G]

These sorts of name complaints are among the most common messages this list gets other than legitimate updates to time zones. There's a whole FAQ dedicated to it, and a large part of the point of doing it this way is to avoid endless squabbling about unimportant details or conflicts between laws and cultures about what things are called, etc. The fact that a lot of them are "incorrect" by some standard is unimportant - what matters is that *a* decision was made.

I suspect it would be greatly appreciated by the members of the TZ database project if a second organization wanted to step in and maintain a second, complementary time zone database competing to be the standard. That sounds sarcastic mostly because it's so unlikely, but don't take it with any sort of bitterness. A second group of maintainers also working on time zone standards would be a great check on this project and, if they were aiming to be a "user friendly" version of the tz database might draw some of these discussions onto their mailing list.

In any case, you may want to read some of the endless discussions in the archives of this mailing list to see the arguments that despite this policy we have at least partially failed to avoid. The one I recall most often is the Kiev/Kyiv debate, so you can maybe use that as a search term.

Best,
Paul (G, not E)

On 05/24/2018 01:45 PM, GsaTitanium wrote:
> Hello mr.Eggert
> 
> 
> Thank you for replying.
> 
> i have checked CLDR. Under their Time Zone section say and i quote: "The time zone IDs (tzid) are language-independent, and follow the TZ time zone database [Olson <https://unicode.org/reports/tr35/tr35.html#Olson>] and naming conventions.” Link: https://unicode.org/reports/tr35/tr35-dates.html#Time_Zone_Names <https://unicode.org/reports/tr35/tr35-dates.html#Time_Zone_Names>
> 
> Where Olson is referring to iana tz database. Link: https://unicode.org/reports/tr35/tr35.html#Olson <https://unicode.org/reports/tr35/tr35.html#Olson> 
> 
> CLDR say that by locale display name may very. Basically what you said to me. But their core data are getting it from iana. So basically iana data: Asia/Nicosia. must change to Europe/Nicosia.
> 
> I understand that core data must not be disabled to any user and that the locale names must be showed, but developers are skipping the process to include the locale data, resulting to display Asia/Nicosia in some programs.
> 
> Are they wrong for not including locale data? Yes they are. But i am trying to resolve the issue from the root, in this case is iana.
> 
> I undestand that you do not like to change data and that your data are based in geological locations and not political. But in this case your data are misleading.
> 
> i know that you are not willing to change your data or the way you collect them so i will end this conversation here.
> 
> Again thank you for replying to me, i appreciate it. I hope in the near future you change you way of doing business before a new organisation come and become the new standard for tz database.
> 
> 
> GsaTitanium
> 
> 
>> On 24 May 2018, at 3:34 AM, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
>>
>> On 05/23/2018 04:43 PM, George Savva wrote:
>>> I don’t think of Nicosia and general Cyprus as being in Europe because i like it. It is the law.
>>
>> That's fine, as tzdb is not intended to take or endorse any position on legal issues. If tzdb had authoritative legal effect in Cyprus or Crimea or Jerusalem or any of dozens of other areas of conflict, we would never be able to get our work done. Luckily for us, tzdb is merely a low-level tool to help programs set civil-time clocks. Names like "Europe/Nicosia" and "Europe/Istanbul" are not supposed to be visible to any but experienced users, and applications are expected to instead display names that users are likely to recognize and understand. For more on this subject, please see:
>>
>> https://data.iana.org/time-zones/theory.html#naming
>>
>> which points to the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) here:
>>
>> http://cldr.unicode.org/
>>
>> The CLDR gives the strings "Λευκωσία" and "Κωνσταντινούπολη" as the suggested way to display the abovementioned time zones for Greek-language user interfaces. Errors in these strings can be reported as described here:
>>
>> https://www.unicode.org/contacts.html
>>
> 
> 

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