Vietnam: Saigon is deprecated, should use capital Hanoi

[Andy Lipscomb]

As was largely hashed out over China, changing to Hanoi would in fact *not* be consistent--the standard is largest city, not necessarily capital. (For example, Australia, Canada, China, India, New Zealand, South Africa, and the USA do not have explicit listings for their capital cities.) I argued that Beijing should be in because of its significance in determining Chinese-calendar dates, but lost that one. As for what to call any given city, on that I have no opinion.

J Andrew Lipscomb, CPA*ABV, ASA

Decosimo Corporate Finance

900 Tallan Building
2 Union Square
Chattanooga, TN 37402
423.756.7100
Fax 423.266.6671
www.dcf.decosimo.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E] [mailto:olsona at dc37a.nci.nih.gov] 
Sent: Mon 25 June 2007 15:21
To: tz at lecserver.nci.nih.gov
Cc: martin.pitt at ubuntu.com
Subject: FW: Vietnam: Saigon is deprecated, should use capital Hanoi

I'm forwarding this message from Martin Pitt, who is not on the time zone mailing list.

Those of you who are on the time zone mailing list should direct replies appropriately.

				--ado

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Pitt [mailto:martin.pitt at ubuntu.com]
Sent: Friday, June 22, 2007 2:27 AM
To: tz at lecserver.nci.nih.gov
Cc: 121540 at bugs.launchpad.net
Subject: Vietnam: Saigon is deprecated, should use capital Hanoi

Hello Arthur and tzdata team,

we just got this tzdata bug in Ubuntu:

  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tzdata/+bug/121540

which points out that "Saigon" has been renamed to "Ho Chi Minh" a long time ago. The comment in the asia file already mentions that:

  # Saigon's official name is Thanh-Pho Ho Chi Minh, but it's too long.
  # We'll stick with the traditional name for now.

A nice solution to avoid obsolete names, retain a short name, and even get more consistent is to use "Hanoi", which is the actual capital of Vietnam (and is the very same TZ). Then Saigon could just be an alias (i. e. transitional symlink) to Hanoi.

What do you think about that?

Thank you in advance,

Martin
-- 
Martin Pitt        http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer   http://www.ubuntu.com
Debian Developer   http://www.debian.org