[tz] Rename Ukrainian cities to their official transliterated names

Michael Douglass mikeadouglass at gmail.com
Thu Oct 4 20:18:59 UTC 2018



On 10/4/18 16:00, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 10/4/18 7:33 AM, Michael Douglass wrote:
>> Opaque ids are what some consumers have been asking for for some time 
>> because of the political implications of the names.
>
> I would rather not change the zone names currently used in tzdb source 
> files, as the change would be a hassle for both maintainers and users, 
> and the existing names simplify maintenance since they are easier to 
> read than opaque IDs would be.
>
> Although we could add an auxiliary table that maps existing names to 
> short, stable, and reasonably opaque identifiers, CLDR is already 
> maintaining such a table and it'd be confusing if we attempted to 
> duplicate that work; plus, such a table would not be useful to tzcode 
> so it wouldn't be tested well by us. For now, we are probably better 
> off improving the already-existing suggestion to use CLDR facilities 
> for consumers worried about politics. Proposed patch attached.
>
I believe this group should be the authoritative source for such an id. 
What happens when zones split etc? There's presumably a delay between 
the split and an appearance in cldr data.

While we continue to provide only the name as the key to a zone people 
will continue to mistake it for something they can present to users. 
Criticizing such people isn't going to stop it.

Not having a uid in the data means we have no choice but to use that 
'human-readable' key. I'd propose adding a UID to VTIMEZONE - happy to 
write the spec - but at the moment there's no usable value.



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