[tz] tzdb timezone names/identifiers and links

Guy Harris guy at alum.mit.edu
Tue Feb 26 19:06:45 UTC 2019


On Feb 26, 2019, at 9:43 AM, Fred Gleason <fredg at paravelsystems.com> wrote:

> Yes, they are very nice and a worthy model to follow. However, in the
> IoT world one often lacks the resources on the target platform for
> including such things.
> 
> Another of the reasons one sees the tzdb identifiers show up in UIs with the frequency that they do (aside from programmer
> laziness) is that they are actually quite intuitive. I've yet to have a user need to ask me about how to set a timezone;

Have you ever had one of them say "I'm in Beijing, but you're only offering me Shanghai"?

Nothing obliges you to use the tzdb identifiers rather than, say, names that might not require knowing how tzdb region IDs are chosen, e.g. "China" as the name for Asia/Shanghai (and something else, such as Xinjiang or Urumqi, for Xinjiang time), other than your platform being *so* small that even a mapping from "names we offer to the user" to "tzdb region IDs" won't fit.


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