[tz] tzdb timezone names/identifiers and links (was: Add new timezone for Hanoi Capital, Vietnam)

Guy Harris guy at alum.mit.edu
Wed Feb 20 22:50:24 UTC 2019


On Feb 20, 2019, at 2:34 PM, Clive D.W. Feather <clive at davros.org> wrote:

> Guy Harris said:
>> Maybe this is *another* case where "some applications "misuse" tzdb identifiers" and where it might "be better to solve this on a more general level such as geo-location<=>timezone mappings", e.g. a meeting date shouldn't be tagged with {date/time, tzdb identifier} but with {date/time, geographic coordinates}.  I'm not sure whether the geographic coordinates of the meeting location are more or less likely to change than the time zone rules of that location,
> 
> That doesn't always solve the problem; it can make it worse.
> 
> For example, I have a meeting which *I* take part in at my location, but is
> booked for 07:00 Seattle time, not 15:00 UK time. I don't want it tagged
> with my location.

If that is a phone or online meeting, rather than an in-person meeting, it doesn't have *a single* location, right?  At *most*, it has a "central" location, where the people coordinating the meeting reside, or something such as that, but that's not the location where the meeting is occurring.

If the expectation is that the calendar software will automatically, through the Magic of the TZDB, show everybody the meeting time at their location, then it's going to have to keep track of the locations of all the participants, so it'll have to get tagged with the location of the (presumed) people in Seattle attending it, and the location of the people in the UK attending it, etc., so that the meeting might be tagged with the "central" location, *and* each participant would be tagged with their location at the time of the meeting.


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