[tz] Reason for removal of several TZ

[Brian Inglis]

On 2017-12-04 12:52, Michael Douglass wrote:
> On 12/4/17 13:09, Brian Inglis wrote:
>> On 2017-12-04 07:05, David Patte ₯ wrote:
>>> On 2017-12-04 02:52, Paul Eggert wrote:
>>>> Although we cannot avoid politics entirely, we should strive to avoid
>>>> as much as possible in tzdb. For example, tzdb should not take any
>>>> position on Israel vs Palestine, North Korea vs South Korea, or Canada
>>>> vs the United States. It's not our job to address such disputes and it
>>>> would be a waste of our limited resources if the disputes got in the
>>>> way of our job.
>>> Its convenient to frame Palestine in this manner, but if you truly wish
>>> to remove your own politics from the db, the politics of the
>>> Palestinians themselves should be the deciding factor here.
>> I wouldn't mind if the country codes were eliminated from zone.tab to
>> avoid politics - it does not serve much function - make that another UI
>> issue to argue with each distro or vendor!
>> Until then we should go as usual with the de facto majority situation on
>> the ground to avoid political claims.> This issue always surfaces at one point or another. I and others have argued
> for a long time that timezone ids should be opaque.> It's really up to some localization feature to provide meaningful names for
> those timezones. The data for those localization already exists - providing 
> region/city names for timezones has just led people to believe they mean
> more than they do.
> I'd suggest a first step would be to provide a unique - reasonably short - 
> opaque id for each definition. That allows us to build out a localization 
> framework around it.
Feel free to write a script to mv each path to its lat/long (and create a link
to its previous name(s) for compatibility) as that is the only other reasonably
stable property of the tz db usable as a name and a l14n reference: otherwise
people will assume the id will always be around and mean something, as with zone
names, country codes, tz abbrs, etc.

Using municipality names has always had the problems that the names are only
unique within, and often span, internal administrative divisions, and sometimes
continents; and may be changed by politicians, or change countries; whereas
lat/longs are infrequently corrected and probably accurate enough across
geodetic datum shifts.

The datum is not specified in Theory: it probably should be.
Has anyone ever checked to see, or knows from geodetic principles, if different
datums used since inception of standard times makes any significant difference
in coordinates?
I know the deltas can be ~.5km: too large to be ignored for surveying and
navigation applications.

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada