[tz] Proposal to use Asia/Tel_Aviv for Israel - Jerusalem is not internationally recognized as part of Israel

[Ian Abbott]

On 2013-05-07 16:47, random832 at fastmail.us wrote:
> On Sat, May 4, 2013, at 13:37, Jonathan Leffler wrote:
>> The cost isn't the cost of generating the patch file.  It's all the other
>> things that have to change that make it expensive.  Most of those changes
>> are not visible to the tz database; they are costs to the consumers of
>> the
>> tx database.  The database changes when necessary, not to be cosmetically
>> more attractive.
>
> At the risk of annoying people by continuing this discussion, I'm
> confused what the supposed cost of this change actually is. Both names
> already exist in the database, which makes it even less of a cost than
> renaming a timezone (and leaving an alias behind) usually has. The
> original change made in 1996 seems best described as "to be cosmetically
> more attractive" anyway, and doesn't seem to have caused any [technical]
> problems.
>
> Unlike Mr. Conradi, I'm willing to assume the original change was based
> on a simple mistake rather than some malicious plot, but I don't see why
> there's such a big objection to changing it back.
>
> High-minded arguments like the one made in
> http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/1998-August/010224.html ignore the fact
> that A) the database explicitly identifies what political boundary each
> timezone falls within in zone.tab and B) even if not, the policy
> implicitly depends on this by requiring that at least one timezone exist
> per region (and per difference since 1970 within a region), despite (for
> example) Europe/Oslo, Europe/Copenhagen, and Europe/Stockholm not having
> actually differed since 1970 - all having no DST between 1970 and 1980,
> and on EU after 1980. Actually, it's unclear to me why those shouldn't
> be aliases when (for example) Europe/Busingen is one. But I digress.
>
> "This naming regime survived the demise of the Soviet Union without
> having to rename `Europe/Moscow' or `Asia/Tashkent'; it survived the
> recent revolution in the Congo without having to worry about its
> country-code change " - Yes, but zone.tab did have to change. Not in
> 1991, since it has only existed since 1996, but it did in fact change
> for the Zaire/Congo change.
>
> The database itself wouldn't even have to change at all. There's no
> problem having a zone.tab line that names an alias - Europe/Busingen is
> one such example.
>
> The only "cost" left is the perceived cost of being seen to give into
> political pressure. But that ignores the fact that the database is
> taking a political position _now_, by mentioning a disputed territory in
> zone.tab. And the fiction that the city names used as timezone
> identifiers aren't seen by humans is just that, a fiction.

Would there be any problems changing the country code for Asia/Jerusalem 
to, say, "XJ" in zone.tab, adding an entry for "XJ" to iso3166.tab and 
adding an entry for Asia/Tel_Aviv with country code "IL" to zone.tab?

-- 
-=( Ian Abbott @ MEV Ltd.    E-mail: <abbotti at mev.co.uk>        )=-
-=( Tel: +44 (0)161 477 1898   FAX: +44 (0)161 718 3587         )=-