[tz] Reason for removal of several TZ abbreviations

[Guy Harris]

On Dec 5, 2017, at 11:31 AM, Garrett Wollman <wollman at csail.mit.edu> wrote:

> <<On Mon, 4 Dec 2017 19:21:04 -0500, Michael Douglass <mikeadouglass at gmail.com> said:
> 
>> Then we can stop having these long arguments about why one name or 
>> another isn't in the tz data. Everybody is free to generate their own 
>> list if they so wish.
> 
> Everybody is free to do that now.
> 
> The truth is that the names of tz regions have effectively formed a
> public interface that users have relied upon for more than two
> decades.  (And no, telling people "just use some GUI picker" does not
> help the network administrator who needs to know what zone name to
> write in dhcpd.conf files on three continents.)

How about "use a command-line picker", e.g.

	$ tzid "Dusseldorf"
	Europe/Berlin
	$ tzid "San Francisco"
	America/Los_Angeles
	$ tzid "San Francisco, Córdoba"
	America/Argentina/Cordoba
	$ tzid "San Francisco, Cordoba"
	America/Argentina/Cordoba
	$ tzid "Beijing"
	Asia/Shanghai

Such a command would actually be better than some of the GUI pickers I've seen, as it actually handles cities other than the one that happened to be chosen for the tzid of the region in which it resides.  It could presumably share the databases it uses with GUI pickers in the same OS, if any.