[tz] About missing country in your Time Zone Database?

[Sadiku, Besnik]

Hi Paul,

Thank you very much for taking care and installing the patches by adding Kosovo to tzdb.
Thank you once again and God bless you.

Sincerely,
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*  Besnik Sadiku, BS in M.C.S. and Web Dev. & Admin.
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-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Eggert [mailto:eggert at cs.ucla.edu] 
Sent: Thursday, May 6, 2021 3:37 PM
To: Sadiku, Besnik
Cc: Time zone mailing list
Subject: Re: [tz] About missing country in your Time Zone Database?

On 5/5/21 11:27 AM, Sadiku, Besnik via tz wrote:
> I ... noticed that Kosovo is missing in the Time Zone Database list.

Good eye. However, although tzdb originally had entries for most countries, an entry is no longer needed if a country's clocks agree with a neighboring region since 1970; see <https://data.iana.org/time-zones/theory.html#naming>. The helps insulate tzdb somewhat from political issues.

tzdb 2021a does have entries like Europe/Ljubljana that are aliases for Europe/Belgrade. However, these are not present in the zone1970.tab file that lists primary tzdb identifiers. As I believe I've mentioned earlier on this mailing list, at some point I should get around to moving those links to the 'backward' file since they're present only for backward-compatibility with earlier tzdb guidelines.


Come to think of it, instead of continuing to put this off let's do it. 
This shouldn't affect most distros, which use the default setup with 'backward'; if anybody's not using 'backward' now's as good a time as any to start using it, if one cares about compatibility.

So I installed the attached proposed patches into the development version of tzdb on GitHub. The last patch adds a comment about Kosovo at the appropriate alphabetical location in the 'europe' file.