[tz] tzdb timezone names/identifiers and links

Martin Burnicki martin.burnicki at meinberg.de
Tue Feb 26 08:32:17 UTC 2019


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, ...

Oops, thanks, I didn't know CLDR before.

> ... though it seems to map
> from TZ names to translated exemplar cities, which is slightly different
> than a direct translation of the TZ name.

In my original email I tried to distinguish between the TZDB ID name
(which of course doesn't have to be translated), and the names that are
actually presented to the user when they select a time zone for their
system, or add a calendar event with a time for a specific zone. The
latter should be localized, IMO.

>> 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.

Agreed. I wanted to point out that either the "primary" local time may
be kept unchanged if the rules for that zone change in the mean time,
and the derived times for participant will change, or vice versa. This
depends on the kind of event, and many people I know are not aware of
this difference.

Martin
-- 
Martin Burnicki

Senior Software Engineer

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