[tz] Dropping iso3166.tab

[Derick Rethans]

On Mon, 20 May 2013, Paul Eggert wrote:

> On 05/20/13 13:59, Garrett Wollman wrote:
> > FreeBSD does this (and always has); you can look at it if you want.
> 
> I have been thinking of proposing to drop iso3166.tab from the
> tz distribution, and to drop all uses of country codes.
> This would help simplify maintenance, as it would mean
> that the database would be unaffected by political
> issues such as whether Kosovo is a country, what country
> Jerusalem is in, what country Taipei is in, etc.  The idea
> is to simplify the database to help us focus on our charter
> (namely, civil time) and to be less distracted by political
> issues that do not affect the clocks.
> 
> As part of this change, the first column of zone.tab
> would change from its current role (a country code)
> to be just a comment.
> 
> I was thinking of changing the comment to be just "--",
> for every entry in zone.tab.   How would this change
> affect FreeBSD's use of zone.tab?

Please don't drop it. PHP's date/time support makes use of the country 
codes to allow selection of possible timezones per country:
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/datetimezone.listidentifiers.php

cheers,
Derick