[tz] Zone name policy

Paul G paul at ganssle.io
Thu Dec 1 21:54:37 UTC 2016


What is that a checksum of? The zone name?

If we're moving away from zone names like that, I don't see any point in hashing an identifier just to obscure it. Better to just use an incrementing counter (Asia/009, America/010) or an algorithm that generates pronouncable names when fed an incrementing counter (Asia/009 -> Asia/Kasoma, America/010 -> America/Fureso).

On December 1, 2016 4:46:39 PM EST, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
>On 12/01/2016 01:30 PM, Guy Harris wrote:
>> It would have been nice if there had been some form of ID that we
>could have used for tzdb zones that*didn't*  involve city names
>
>How about SHA-256 checksums? Instead of "Europe/Kiev" the zone name 
>would be 
>"099d2adb7f9a187c25224cd49364de6d510d6e89924584c0b97d88d3f801e551", 
>which would make users less likely to raise political objections. 
>SHA3-512 is also a possibility, although SHA3 software isn't as mature 
>and the names would be a bit long. (:-)
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