[tz] Pre-1970 data

Guy Harris gharris at sonic.net
Fri Nov 5 19:47:03 UTC 2021


On Nov 5, 2021, at 12:01 PM, Brian Park via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> The practical reality is that the TZDB identifiers are externally visible identifiers to end-users. The Unix system forces the TZDB identifiers on to the user when I have to type this:
> $ TZ=America/Toronto date

1) The practical reality is that the TXDB identifiers are externally visible identifiers to *those end users who switch time zones on the command line*.  This is a subset of the set of end users.

2) Perhaps the problem there is that you can't, for example, do

	$ TZ=`tzid Ottawa` date

or something such a that - not everybody in the Canadian Eastern time zone is in Toronto.  ("tzid" could also, for example, allow "Ottawa, ON, CA" or "Ottawa, IL, US" or "Ottawa, KS, US" or "Ottawa, CI"; *defaulting* to Ottawa, ON, CA probably makes sense.)

3) If the problem is that "America" often refers to the US in English, then, as has been noted, the choice of "America" rather than "Americas" was the cause of the problem.  Then *nobody* in the Americas would have their country's name in the tzdb ID for the region they're in.


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