(Cyprus), Nicosia is in Europe not Asia.

[Paul Eggert]

Paul Hill <phill at myriad.com> writes:

> But I believe the tzdata actually redundantly lists some entries.
> If I recall, the US territories in the Pacific (Guam?, American Samoa?) are
> listed in two files but with the same IDs.

There are many redundancies if you look at the "backward" file, since
it contains backward-compatibility links for older names like US/Pacific
that have been superseded by newer names like America/Los_Angeles.

But if you omit the "backward" file, almost all redundancies are where
two different locations have the same time zone history since 1970
(e.g. Europe/Rome and Europe/San_Marino).  These redundancies are
needed only to satisfy the rule that each country gets at least one
location.  There is only one exception to this general rule: Istanbul
has the two entries Europe/Istanbul and Asia/Istanbul.  I think this
is OK, as Istanbul actually does span continents.

I don't know of any current official dividing line between Europe and
Asia, or between Asia and Africa for that matter, so I suppose there
could be more points of controversy in the distant future as the
dividing line encounters time zone splits.  Maybe by then there will
be a standard, or we'll use a different naming scheme.

As for Cyprus, the tz database generally tries to avoid political and
cultural questions, as they are distractions from its intended
purpose.  Culturally, Cyprus is more European than Asian (and has been
so for most of its history); but if we went by culture, we'd have to
do things like putting Australia under Europe and this wouldn't make
much sense from a time zone point of view.  Geographically, Cyprus is
clearly in Asia, and this has long been recognized.  For example,
please see Herodotus, Histories, I.72.