[tz] What data should TZDB offer?

[Stephen Colebourne]

On Mon, 7 Jun 2021 at 15:24, Eliot Lear via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:
> Without getting into any of the substance of any of the proposals you
> mentioned, a hopefully minor aside:
>
> On 06.06.21 10:08, Stephen Colebourne via tz wrote:
> > I acknowledge that the above is a significant change to TZBD, but it
> > does more fully align TZDB with the Governmental authorities that
> > actually define time zones.
>
> The goal of this database has never been to align to governmental
> authorities, but to express what people in a region think local time
> is.  Let's please not lose sight of that.

And yet there are (older) TZ region names for many countries,
including Eire, Egypt, Turkey, GB, Israel, Hongkong, PRC, NZ... There
are also modern names with countries/states in them, eg
America/Argentina/Cordoba and America/Indiana/Indianapolis. Given
this, I think "never" is a significant overstretch.

"what people in a region think" is essentially unknowable. What
governmental authorities define is generally well recorded. Where we
can accurately fnd data to indicate that a region is not following the
lead of the governmental authorities then I agree we need to make sure
that those people's experience can be expressed in some form by TZDB.
But I think that governmental authorities so dominate the field of
timezones, and what our downstream users perceive of timezones, that
we need to reflect it. Putting our heads in the sand and pretending
that governmental authorities don't exist is not helpful.

Stephen