[tz] Dropping iso3166.tab
Derick Rethans
tz at derickrethans.nl
Mon May 20 23:18:57 UTC 2013
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
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