[tz] Idea for internationalized time point unique time zone abbreviations

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Thu, 07 Jun 2012 18:53:20 +0200, Petr Machata <pmachata at redhat.com> said:

> In Fedora Linux in particular zone identifier translations are stuffed
> at system-config-date.  I recall that Debian has a dedicated package for
> that.  In both these cases, the translation is done by calling gettext
> on a time zone identifier.

That seems like a really odd thing to do.  Why not translate zone.tab?
That's what user interfaces should be using to select zones anyway.
The TZid is just a token you can hand to the C library (the fact that
it's also a pathname is just an implementation detail).

> That's because the TZ identifier is not stored in zoneinfo file.  Doing
> so would prevent us from hardlinking equal zones to save disk space.
> (Though I don't know if this is the reason the TZID is absent from the
> file, or the hardlinking trick is the consequence of this.)

In recent releases of FreeBSD the tzsetup utility automatically stores
the installed zone's TZid in /var/cache/zoneinfo so that it can be
reinstalled without user intervention when the tzdata is updated using
"tzsetup -r".  Many FreeBSD machines still have a separate /usr
partition becuase that is the traditional partitioning setup.

-GAWollman