[tz] Dropping iso3166.tab

David Patte ₯ dpatte at relativedata.com
Wed May 22 16:07:18 UTC 2013


On 2013-05-22 10:14, Robert Elz wrote:
> For example (and I know this one is extremely far fetched) suppose that
> the people who live in the region of Kosovo, which might or might not be
> recognised as a country, sooner or later, were to decide, today, that as
> from Sun June 2 2013, they were going to change their timezone, and that
> was reported to us, later today.
>
> We would have a week and a half to make and distribute a new tzdata
> distribution with the new zone in it.   Tight, but we've done that before.
>
> But, if we're depending upon ISO, or the UN, or someone to decide what
> country code to apply, what do we do next?  Frantic phone calls to the
> UN secretary general demanding a decision or we'll sack him?   Not going
> to work, is it?

That is absurd. I don't see the problem. Until recognized by the UN, the 
country in this case can be left as Serbia, and you simply have to 
choose a city in the Kosovo region of Serbia, if it is expected that the 
people in that city will use that time change. The country code for 
Kosovo is already reserved for the future, by the way. Kosovo did it 
long ago. And when ISO or the UN changes, then thats when to change the 
tz database country code.

Its easy, and follows international standards.

ISO 3166-1 has become one of the world’s most well known and widely used 
standards for coding country names. Using a code of letters and/or 
numbers to represent a country name can help save time and energy, and 
reduce the rate of error.

The country codes found in ISO 3166-1 are used by many organizations, 
businesses and governments. For example all national postal 
organizations throughout the world exchange international mail in 
containers bearing its country code for identification. In machine 
readable passports, the codes from ISO 3166-1 are used to determine the 
nationality of the user. In addition, internet domain name systems use 
the codes to define top level domain names such as 'fr' for France, 'au' 
for Australia and 'br' for Brazil.

The problem in tz is not the country code.

The problem in tz is the city currently chosen in the database for 
certain country codes.

Swapping 2 link records makes the database consistant with international 
standards.

You sure seem like you are going to a great effeort to avoid following international standards - why?




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