[tz] Rename Ukrainian cities to their official transliterated names

Volodymyr Kostyrko arcade at b1t.name
Wed Oct 3 21:13:26 UTC 2018


03.10.18 20:46, Guy Harris wrote:
> On Oct 3, 2018, at 10:04 AM, Tim Parenti <tim at timtimeonline.com> wrote:
> 
>> In particular, the spellings in current use by this project generally remain much more common in English-language media.  This project attempts to reflect mainstream English-language spellings for place names (see theory.html), and explicitly does not attempt to reflect transliterations.
> 
> And, again, for the 5 trillionth time:
> 
> If a user interface shows the tzdb region names to most end users and requires most end users to set the tzdb region by selecting from a list of tzdb region names - and this includes names generated from tzdb region names, e.g. "helpfully" using "Los Angeles" in the "America" region rather than "America/Los_Angeles" to select the US Pacific time zone - it is not a good user interface.
> 
> Those names are identifiers for software use, just as LANG environment variable settings such as en_US.UTF-8 are identifiers for software use, *not* names that most end users should have to deal with, so making the names "look appropriate" is not the highest priority.
> 

I must admit that you are right. But the point is that this is not the 
final position everyone can agree with.

Taking PHP community as a an example they are using raw zone names in 
their configuration files. If any thirdparty vendor would try to 
translate this zones in his application he will face a choice - to be 
correct about zone naming according to each language or to forfeit 
correctness in favor of clear and unambiguous configuration. And he 
should choose the latter. I can't blame him neither.

Renaming things others depend upon is also a very sloppy path that 
shouldn't being followed so easily. Though this raises a problem similar 
to "master-and-slave" concept. Most people are feeling fine with the 
names as they are just a hollow words that mean nothing to them, though 
for a very limited number of people who faced slavery or humiliation 
this will be just a trigger and they will not stop fighting to make 
everyone else stop treating this words as "normal" and not "shameful". 
Most of you feel nothing about Kiev/Kyiv difference, but for a lot of 
Ukrainians the former is a sign of a communist slavery, the mark of 
alien possession over they father's land. Leaving things as they are 
will not solve the problem for them, and they wouldn't stop trying to 
change it. That's politics. Even if you try to stay unbiased and techy 
you have to choose something, and this choice will make your side.

Probably this can be easily solved by scrapping full town names and 
switching to some indices like UAK/UAZ/UAU but that's totally out of the 
scope of my knowledge of tz database rules and principles. And also in 
this case I'm a biased person. Totally not for me to decide.

Thank you.

-- 
Sphinx of black quartz judge my vow.



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