[tz] EU Public Consultation on summertime arrangements

[Brian Inglis]

On 2018-07-09 09:38, John Wilcock wrote:
>>> Surely tz could/would simply define new Western, Central and Eastern European
>>> Standard Time zones and assign the relevant locations to them as from the
>>> transition date, rather than "model" them to existing zones? Or are you
>>> suggesting that systems that aren't properly updated would present misleading
>>> names to users?

>> WET, CET, EET, and related summer time zones have defined meanings, and are also
>> used by other non-EU countries, who may continue to observe DST or not. It would
>> make no sense to change names which are understood, to have different meanings,
>> depending on whether a country had EU membership.

> Ultimately, official and/or public usage will determine the names that are
> actually used -- and presumably the tz database will track that actual usage.

If widely used about that zone in English language web sources; what is used by
systems for any zone and locale is their UI choice, sometimes that defined in
the Unicode CLDR cultural data repository, used by the ICU package and library.

> IMO, if the EU decides to mandate that its member states must cease to observe
> summer time, and the EU or the member states further decide (as would seem quite
> likely) to keep using WET/CET/EET as time zone abbreviations then, given the
> importance of the EU within the wider European region, any non-EU countries
> using one of the current WET/CET/EET will have little choice but to align with
> the changes or find a new name for their time zone.

This project does not consider abbreviations canonical, so if English language
web sources widely refer to different zone times using the same abbreviation,
they are defined as such, e.g. EST in AU and US, IST in a number of countries.

Many such abbreviations not widely used about that zone in English language web
sources have been dropped, and zone entries cleaned up to use only the UTC
offset text e.g. +01 instead of CET.

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