FW: Theory - zone name, zone creation, zone lifetime

[Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E]]

I'm forwarding this message from Tobias Conradi, who is not on the time zone mailing list.
Those of you who are on the list, please direct replies appropriately.

        --ado
________________________________________
From: Mr tobias conradi [tobias_conradi at yahoo.de]
Sent: Sunday, September 11, 2011 12:19 AM
To: tz at elsie.nci.nih.gov
Subject: Theory - zone name, zone creation, zone lifetime

Theory reads:
To represent this data, the world is partitioned
into regions whose clocks all agree about time
stamps that occur after the somewhat-arbitrary
cutoff point of the POSIX Epoch (1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC).

Issue:
1) Where are these regions listed?
The only lists of geographical areas I could find are:
- the zones in zone.tab
- (current) countries in iso3166.tab


Theory reads:
Use ISO 3166 (see the file iso3166.tab) to help
decide whether something is a country.
[...]
or when locations change countries
(e.g. Hong Kong from UK colony to China)

Issue:
1) "help to decide" - decision process is undefined.

2) Hong Kong is listed in iso3166.tab as HK.For the purpose of zone creation is it
2a) a country,then it is confusing
to say it changed country, or

2b) is it part of China (CN) then it is
confusing to mark it with HK

3) In case HK and one of the zones in CN
observed the same time since 1970, and that HK
is not a country, would there be a merge and
would one zone be dropped from zone.tab
and any corresponding pre-1970 history be deleted?


Theory reads:
Within a file name component, use only ASCII letters

Issue:
1) It is not defined what the term
"file name component" refers to in the
context of zone naming.



Theory reads:
E.g. prefer `Paris' to `France', since
France has had multiple time zones.

Issue:
1) It does not matter what zones France "had" in the past.
2) It may matter that Europe/Paris might be split in the future.
3) There is no proof in zone.tab that France had
multiple time zones at all, there is only one line marked "FR":
FR+4852+00220Europe/Paris







--
Tobias Conradi
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10115 Berlin, Germany


http://tobiasconradi.com