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

[John Hawkinson]

Am I the only one who is terribly uncomfortable with how this played out?

My interpretation is that the original requester (Besnik Sadiku) misunderstood what Paul did, and came away with concluding that we had done as he requested, when in fact we perhaps (arguably) did the opposite.

At the very least, I think, it is incumbent upon us to modify the language we use in responding to requests like this so that it is much less prone to misinterpretation.

It is possible that there is a good ethical argument in favor of further clarification to the original requester, who I have dropped from the cc list now.

--
jhawk at alum.mit.edu
John Hawkinson


Sadiku, Besnik via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote on Thu,  6 May 2021
at 16:42:40 EDT in <E76652CD7298BA44A928DE13F0431F670F5A8239 at MHMBX1.internal.mhemail.org>:

> 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,
> *******************************************
> *  Besnik Sadiku, BS in M.C.S. and Web Dev. & Admin.
> *  Business Analyst 2 / Certified 
> *  Office: (608) 741-5629
> *  Cell:      (262) 473-9511
> *  e-mail: bsadiku at mhemail.org
> *******************************************
>   
> 
> 
> -----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.