[tz] Time zones in conflict areas

[Paul Eggert]

On 11/28/20 9:34 AM, Andriy Ivanchenko wrote:
> It looks like your base has inadvertently become a hostage to politics.

Politics inevitably intrude upon timekeeping, and this has been true for 
millennia. The best we can do is minimize the effect; we cannot eliminate it.

As for timekeeping in conflict areas, we typically don't track it carefully. We 
don't have entries for every town that changed hands during World War II, during 
the wars in Congo since 1996, etc., etc. We and our users simply don't have the 
resources for that. If a city already has an entry for other reasons we may try 
to track its civil timekeeping through a conflict, but we won't create an entry 
simply because there was a war and a city changed hands temporarily.

In short, tzdb is a peacetime database. It is not designed for conflict and 
people engaged in a war will likely need to set their clocks by other means.