Renaming Saigon to TP Ho Chi Minh

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Fri, 21 Mar 2008 18:49:02 +0100
    From:        =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Claus_F=E4rber?= <GMANE at faerber.muc.de>
    Message-ID:  <fs0sem$6ar$1 at ger.gmane.org>

First, I am not going to bother to reply to your previous message,
we've been through all of that before - for anyone who wants answers,
look back through archives of the tz list, and they're all there.

  | I don't think the new system really works better. It moves the problems 
  | from the database management to the people using it.

Yes, to some extent it does.   But who do you think they are?   This project
is collecting and keeping data on the world's timezones, as accurately as
we can, and making that, and some software that interprets it available,
to anyone, for free.

Incorporating that into the various systems is someone else's job.
Providing an end-user interface is someone else's job.

Some of that is well done, some of it isn't, none of it is relevant here.

  | How do you know you're supposed to select America/Indiana/Vincennes if 
  | you live in America/USA/Indiana/Martin_County and not America/Indiana/ 
  | Indianapolis?

I have no idea, I have never lived there.   But that's a different issue,
that's "how do I know what my timezone is", which isn't something we can
answer.

Nor is it our job to attempt to explain the political absurdities that
lead to that mess in the first place.

  | What happens if, e.g. Spain decides to move part of the country from CET 
  | (+01:00) to WET (+00:00)? Europe/Madrid would suddenly become wrong for 
  | all of the users without warning.

Yes - for all of the users in the zone that was not the same as Madrid.

But with a simple question "what's the largest city/town that always has
their clock set the same as yours", and for people who can actually
answer the question, that will be easy.   I don't know enough Spanish
geography to pick the answer, but I suspect that the affected people would.

That is, once they know they have to upgrade at all - that's always going to
be a problem with anything that has to react to anything that gets changed
arbitrarily and for reasons that cannot be predicted very far in advance
(like just about any political decision.)

kre