[tz] KyivNotKiev

[Guy Harris]

On Nov 27, 2020, at 1:19 AM, Clive D.W. Feather <clive at davros.org> wrote:

> Andriy Ivanchenko said:
> 
>> Here https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/55-2010-??#Text you can see
>> transliteration at the state level, if that helps.
>> Maybe it's time to introduce multilingual support in your database?
> 
> The time zone database is not the place for multilingual support or
> characters other than ASCII.

The Theory file:

	https://data.iana.org/time-zones/theory.html

says, among other things:

	Here are the general guidelines used for choosing timezone names, in decreasing order of importance:

	   * Use only valid POSIX file name components (i.e., the parts of names other than '/'). Do not use the file name components '.' and '..'. Within a file name component, use only ASCII letters, '.', '-' and '_'. Do not use digits, as that might create an ambiguity with POSIX TZ strings. A file name component must not exceed 14 characters or start with '-'. E.g., prefer Asia/Brunei to Asia/Bandar_Seri_Begawan. Exceptions: see the discussion of legacy names below.

	...

	   * Use mainstream English spelling, e.g., prefer Europe/Rome to Europa/Roma, and prefer Europe/Athens to the Greek Ευρώπη/Αθήνα or the Romanized Evrópi/Athína. The POSIX file name restrictions encourage this guideline.

> There are other projects which do this, such
> as CLDR
> (http://cldr.unicode.org/translation/timezones).

Yes.

If you want to, for example, provide a user interface to allow a user to choose the tzdb region for their machine, it should, at minimum, use the CLDR's name for the exemplar city.  Ideally, it should provide a *choice* of cities, so, for example, somebody in Beijing doesn't have to choose Shanghai (whether in Simplified Chinese or in English or...), and somebody in San Francisco doesn't have to choose Los Angeles.

> The names used in the time zone database are identifiers and long-term
> stability of these names is an important matter. It is not an absolute -
> such name changes have been made before

For example, Asia/Calcutta - Asia/Kolkata in March 2008.