[tz] tzdb timezone names/identifiers and links (was: Add new timezone for Hanoi Capital, Vietnam)

Stephen Colebourne scolebourne at joda.org
Thu Feb 21 00:22:35 UTC 2019


On Thu, 21 Feb 2019 at 00:09, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> Although these names may be
> inappropriate for nontechnical users, they're explicitly not designed
> for that, and attempting to support them in applications they're not
> designed for will likely cause everybody more trouble than it's worth.
> It's not clear that we should continue to cater to such attempts by
> splitting or renaming timezones for purely political reasons.

Its absolutely clear to me that TZDB should provide such identifiers.
Java exposes all Link entries as first class citizens precisely for
this reason. It really doesn't matter what TZDB maintainers think the
IDs should be used for in some perfect theoretical view. What actually
matters is how they are used in real life by real end users.

The logical result of this course of action is that downstream
projects/users will have to create their own identifiers. Do you want
that?

Going "la la la" and trying to pretend that countries don't exist is
IMO ridiculous and will cause maintainers far more pain.

Stephen


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