[tz] tzdb timezone names/identifiers and links

[Lester Caine]

On 26/02/2019 22:03, Guy Harris wrote:
> If there are are engineers who have to know about tzdb regions, but aren't yet familiar with the tzdb, the documentation for whatever product is being discussed should explain it to them - including the rules from the Theory file, so they understand that the names don't necessarily correspond to, and aren't intended to correspond to, the layman's notion of the name for a "time zone", or "the most important city in z time zone, for some definition of "most important"", or anything such as that.

The other area here that gets totally ignored is historic changes to the 
rules. And while my own annoyance is the lack of pre-1970 clarity, it's 
CURRENT historic changes that are more important. If a OS simply updates 
from one version of TZ to the next there is no provision to flag that 
the meeting that was booked for 9AM UTC next month is now at a different 
local time as the rule HAS changed. This in my book is a lot more 
important to be flagged than any problem with the name of the rules 
being used? That a location may now be using a different rule set due to 
a boundary change is one aspect, but that the currently selected rule 
set has changed IS within the confines of TZ ... simply pretending that 
all that exists is the current version has always been wrong.

Where the NAME of the rule set becomes more important is my other 
irritation ... the provision by the browser of JUST a current time 
offset. This hole in the system needs plugging so that the browser CAN 
identify the rule set being used so one knows if the client really has a 
fixed time offset, or next month that offset will be different ...

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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