[tz] Timezone error (Kyiv not Kiev)

Steve Summit scs at eskimo.com
Tue Jul 5 19:45:32 UTC 2022


Doug Ewell wrote:
> No matter how strongly we oppose the current and 2014 invasions,
> or the actions of the Third Reich, time zone identifiers are not
> political statements.

Indeed they are not.  Well said.  (In fact it's right up there
with Jamie Lee Curtis's line from A Fish Called Wanda: "The
London Underground is not a political movement.")

As regulars well know, but newcomers may not, time zone identifiers
are just that: identifiers.  They're somewhat arbitrary; they're
not primarily intended for human consumption.  If you can imagine
for a moment that the identifier for the zone of interest here
was not the string "Europe/Kyiv", but rather, the number 7252,
we wouldn't be having these internecine and unnecessarily
politicized debates over spelling.

What end-user interfaces are there that present raw tz identifiers
for selection, and that might therefore confuse or offend users
if the spellings are culturally inappropriate?  If the time and
energy being spent lobbying this list for unnecessary changes to
the database could instead be directed towards rooting out and
correcting those interfaces, it would be far more productive.

(A while back, I went and implemented the old suggestion that we
augment or replace the tz names by arbitrary numbers like 7252.
I suppose I should post that code for consideration.)


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