[tz] Crimean timezones

[Brian Inglis]

On 2019-06-21 02:59, Sergij Marchenko wrote:
> By making such a proposal to Mr. Demediuk you are in fact taking sides despite
> your alleged neutrality. Russia's claims to Crimea are not supported by anyone
> but Russia itself, perhaps barring a negligible amount of countries that have
> their own governments largely criticized as undemocratic. The vast majority of
> countries have openly condemned the annexation and Russian aggression and
> continue to recognize Crimea as a Ukrainian territory it is.
> 
> A solution, which is more consistent with your view, exists. The patch could
> instead make the interface display the timezones in question as Russian to
> Russian users alone, while in the rest of the world they would be listed as
> Ukrainian. This practice, although controversial in the face of the
> international law, is a lesser violation of it than the current state of matter.
> 
> By keeping things the way they are now you are sending the world a message. The
> message is that you are endorsing the aggressor, even though it may not appear
> to you as such.
> 
> With a leaden heart we would accept the territory being assigned to different
> countries depending on a user's geolocation, provided that RU only shows up for
> Russian users and UA is the default configuration elsewhere, globally.
> 
> Otherwise we would kindly ask you to drop the neutrality claims and make your
> open endorsement of Russian military aggression against Ukraine transparent.

How downstream projects, systems, distros, and their interfaces use timezones is
independent of this list, sometimes mediated using CLDR data and metadata
handled by ICU libraries.
Please direct any comments about interfaces to your software provider.

If you read Paul's response and the actual patch, you would see the change made
to the data.
The data policy attempts to reflect the technical reality in a zone, to provide
a service to those in, communicating with, or using communications from, that
zone, without that reflecting any political view.

Even Wikipedia now waffles about Crimea's and its regions and cities de jure
Ukrainian status and de facto Russian status, which is not feasible with
technical data.

It is understandable why some would like to see this project drop meaningful
city names and use arbitrary zone identifiers, replace alphabetic time zone
abbreviations with numeric offsets, and eliminate country associations.

Such changes would eliminate the complaints on the list about using English
spellings for continents, oceans, countries, territories, regions, cities, and
abbreviations, rather than local spellings or scripts.

Such changes would leave all meaningful associations between the data and actual
geographical entities to comments and downstream localization providers.

Each provider could present the relevant views corresponding to the political
views in each locale, without being aware of differing views being presented to
other locales.

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

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