[tz] Recent conversions of zones to aliases

[Lester Caine]

On 03/10/14 19:49, Guy Harris wrote:
>> But it is more than that. There are definitely people upset to see their timezone reported as being that of a city in a different country, simply because they happened to have the same rules. Most of the above have small populations, where one could argue that it doesn't matter much (and Kosovo is a special case).
> Yes, it would be nice if we had abstract identifiers for timezones rather than something that reflects the effects of politics (and of population shifts).  (That might also force systems to have better mechanisms for selecting time zones than "put up a bunch of tzids and let the user pick one".)

The data is not directly location based, so perhaps the proper tidy here
is a switch to abstract ID's to get away from any 'political bias'. This
then allows a location to TZID mapping system perhaps geonames based to
include the start date, and then augment the TZ data with local offsets
prior to the relevant data set becoming active.

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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