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

[Paul Eggert]

On 2/20/19 4:37 AM, Stephen Colebourne wrote:

> When a country splits, it is usually for painful reasons. The idea 
> that the half of the country should be forced to use the old 
> identifier simply isn't tenable.
>
And yet (as Hans-Joerg Happel mentions) Ubuntu and other systems are 
doing just that in countries that have split up extraordinarily 
painfully, as shown in the example interaction below. So it seems this 
approach is tenable enough, at least for the technical interfaces that 
timezone names are designed for. 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.

----

$ tzselect
Please identify a location so that time zone rules can be set correctly.
Please select a continent, ocean, "coord", or "TZ".
  1) Africa
  2) Americas
  3) Antarctica
  4) Asia
  5) Atlantic Ocean
  6) Australia
  7) Europe
  8) Indian Ocean
  9) Pacific Ocean
10) coord - I want to use geographical coordinates.
11) TZ - I want to specify the timezone using the Posix TZ format.
#? 7
Please select a country whose clocks agree with yours.
  1) Albania               18) Guernsey              35) Poland
  2) Andorra               19) Hungary               36) Portugal
  3) Austria               20) Ireland               37) Romania
  4) Belarus               21) Isle of Man           38) Russia
  5) Belgium               22) Italy                 39) San Marino
  6) Bosnia & Herzegovina  23) Jersey                40) Serbia
  7) Britain (UK)          24) Latvia                41) Slovakia
  8) Bulgaria              25) Liechtenstein         42) Slovenia
  9) Croatia               26) Lithuania             43) Spain
10) Czech Republic        27) Luxembourg            44) Svalbard & Jan Mayen
11) Denmark               28) Malta                 45) Sweden
12) Estonia               29) Moldova               46) Switzerland
13) Finland               30) Monaco                47) Turkey
14) France                31) Montenegro            48) Ukraine
15) Germany               32) Netherlands           49) Vatican City
16) Gibraltar             33) North Macedonia       50) Åland Islands
17) Greece                34) Norway
#? 6

The following information has been given:

         Bosnia & Herzegovina

Therefore TZ='Europe/Belgrade' will be used.
Selected time is now:   Thu Feb 21 01:00:44 CET 2019.
Universal Time is now:  Thu Feb 21 00:00:44 UTC 2019.
Is the above information OK?
1) Yes
2) No
#? 1

You can make this change permanent for yourself by appending the line
         TZ='Europe/Belgrade'; export TZ
to the file '.profile' in your home directory; then log out and log in 
again.

Here is that TZ value again, this time on standard output so that you
can use the ./tzselect command in shell scripts:
Europe/Belgrade