[tz] tzdb timezone names/identifiers and links

[Martin Burnicki]

Sorry for jumping in so late. I've been on a short vacation with very
limited internet access, and have just read the emails in this thread.

If the current time zone names should indeed just be taken as IDs rather
than real names then IMO it would be very helpful if there also was a
list of mappings provided that links readable display names to TZDB ID
names.

Otherwise each project has to do this by itself, and the problem seems
to be that some projects just use the ID names from TZDB while other
projects do the mapping by themselves.

If there was a mapping list included with TZDB then different projects
could rely to them and use the same, consistent information and displaying.

Anyway, there's still a different point. I'm assuming that English is
the native language for most members of this list, but most applications
taking care about time zones let users select them zone in their native
language, so some internationalization would also be very helpful.

For example, the zone "Europe/Macedonia" is displayed as
"Europa/Makedonien" on my Linux/KDE system set to German language. As
far as I can see each project that has to deal with this kind of things
has to provide the translations by themselves.

Since TZDB is maintained on github I'd expect there would be quite some
folks that were happy to provide translations for zone names, eventually
exported from their own, local projects.

Once such a mapping list has been set up it should not be to hard to
maintain it, and those who make changes to the DB itself know best which
of the mapped links would be affected by a particular change.


Another point that has recently been discussed is how an event time is
affected if the time zone rules change after the point in time where the
event is created for some local time, and before the time the  event
happens.

I think we'd have too distinguish a little bit. If there is a virtual
meeting scheduled in local time for 11:30 New York time, and the New
York time zone changes by 1 hour then I'd expect that the event time
will still be 11:30 local time, but the event time for my location in
Central Europe will change by 1 hour.

On the other hand, if I've booked a flight for 11:30 New York time and
the New York time zone changes then eventually the departure time may
also change by 1 hour to keep the flight consistent with connection
flights in other time zones.

So it depends on the application, but in any case it would be helpful if
at least the time zone names on my PC, on my smartphone, etc. would be
consistent.


Martin
-- 
Martin Burnicki

Senior Software Engineer

MEINBERG Funkuhren GmbH & Co. KG
Email: martin.burnicki at meinberg.de
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