[tz] tzdb timezone names/identifiers and links

Brian Inglis Brian.Inglis at SystematicSw.ab.ca
Mon Feb 25 17:10:52 UTC 2019


On 2019-02-25 05:37, Tony Finch wrote:
> Martin Burnicki <martin.burnicki at meinberg.de> wrote:
>>
>> For example, the zone "Europe/Macedonia" is displayed as
>> "Europa/Makedonien" on my Linux/KDE system set to German language. As
>> far as I can see each project that has to deal with this kind of things
>> has to provide the translations by themselves.
>>
>> Since TZDB is maintained on github I'd expect there would be quite some
>> folks that were happy to provide translations for zone names, eventually
>> exported from their own, local projects.
> 
> I thought this kind of thing was done by the CLDR, though it seems to map
> from TZ names to translated exemplar cities, which is slightly different
> than a direct translation of the TZ name.
> 
>> Another point that has recently been discussed is how an event time is
>> affected if the time zone rules change after the point in time where the
>> event is created for some local time, and before the time the  event
>> happens.
> 
> The way to deal with this is to assign the event a sensible primary
> location, and do the mapping from location -> tz lazily on demand.
> However the standard data model (iCalendar) doesn't allow this.

The sensible locations would be major cities and towns in each country's time
zones. To support this apps need a common gazetteer to map from major cities and
towns to tzids.

GeoNames.org data provides timezones for many locations, is used by many orgs,
and is a good base if the CC BY 4 licence conditions are acceptable
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
License. Forums and mailing lists are hosted on Google groups.

Pareto principle applies here, as most people in most countries currently use a
single time zone, so a location mapping to a country defines their observed time
zone; minorities observe different time zones for business, colonial, cultural,
economic, geographic, historical, or social reasons; some countries, mainly in
the Americas, require more than a single time zone because they spread widely
across longitudes, with additional time zone variations because of the above
differences; these countries and minorities need better mappings.

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

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