[tz] Change Request: Europe/Kiev to Europe/Kyiv

[John Hawkinson]

I do not think we have handled this well; we have not given Victor Perov a good answer. Indeed, to some extent we've made it a "runaround." We can do better.

We should take the time to write up a good lengthy explanation of the issues ("boilerplate"), because this a really important issue of concern to many people in the world and the project has indeed thought about it pretty carefully. Dismissing the inquiries because they are repetitive makes it seem like we haven't, and that unnecessarily upsets peopl.

Victor Perev: I don't have time for a full write-up right now, but please consult the archives of the tz list (http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/ or perhaps https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amm.icann.org%2Fpipermail%2Ftz%2F+kyiv which returns 203 results). The tz project is very conservative in its judgment for when the predominant English spelling of a city has changed, and so far the project has judged that Kiev is still preferred. We discussed it when major English newspapers and style guides changed from Kiev to Kyiv last year (prompted by the US presidential impeachment, which lead to a lot of discussion about Kyiv in America), and we will probably continue to discuss it as time goes on. But we've thought about it and discussed it a lot. The answers you got don't explain that, and that means we have not done a good a job as we should have. Sorry about that.

In particular, I think Brian Inglis's answer was actually incorrect in a way that really matters ("Kiev is the correct English spelling").
There are multiple correct English spellings. It used to be that Kiev was the only one, but Kyiv is gaining popularity more and more. 


Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote on Sat, 15 Aug 2020
at 18:19:08 EDT in <cefc7f01-a3e9-f2a4-9ab9-5288147f994a at cs.ucla.edu>:

> Thanks for bringing that to the mailing list (if I could shut off GitHub
> pull requests I would).

Although you cannot do so, we can handle them a little bit better.
Please see https://docs.github.com/en/github/building-a-strong-community/creating-a-pull-request-template-for-your-repositor

You can create a template that explains to a would-be pull request submitter than pull requests will be closed and the project uses the mailing list for development discussions. ("I understand that the tz project does not use pull requests on github, and that if I enter a pull request here, it will be closed and I will be directed to send email to tz at iana.org.")

For the particular case of regular, recurring issues, it may be worth while to keep one of #15, #26, and #27 open and mark the others as a duplicate of it, so that it is easier for newcomers to understand that this issue has been carefully considered and is not a simple oversight.

https://github.com/eggert/tz/pulls?q=kiev

Also, not to pick on Brian (again), but if the project policy is not to use github pull requests, it's not great to respond to pull requests on their substance, because it bifurcates the discussion and makes it seem like we actually do use pull requests ("except when we don't"). So what seems like a helpful thing may not be.

--
jhawk at alum.mit.edu
John Hawkinson