[tz] Terminology: “Central European Summer Time” vs “Europe/Berlin”

[Neil Fuller]

>
> Perhaps the tzdb *should* maintain a notion of "metazones", giving them
> names; it would leave it up to the CLDR to assign localized abbreviations
> and display names for them.
>

If TZDB has the information to do this, and it doesn't open the TZDB
maintainers up to more geopolitical headaches than today, I personally
think that's a good idea. I'm assuming it would actually be usable for
downstream folks.

Somebody on the CLDR side may come along later and point out where the art
lies in all this and why TZDB may want to steer clear. They've been
tracking TZDB updates for years so they have probably encountered any
issues along the way.

One disconnect I'm aware of, in the past (at least) CLDR liked to have
identifier stability. As I understand it, they have declared their zone IDs
as "stable" (canonical, I think, in their nomenclature). Although I think
TZDB already gives guarantees about never removing IDs, CLDR commit to not
changing the ones they use. Although they recognize all TZDB's zone IDs,
adding new ones as needed, they still use ones like Asia/Calcutta
internally as their keys in preference to Asia/Kolkata. If there were an
appetite for TZDB to start mastering metazones, they might find guarantees
useful around metazone IDs not shifting over time so they wouldn't need to
build in indirection.

As a side note, I was also present at some recent discussions where, for
embedded usage, ICU folks were considering "short" IDs for some time zone
concepts. I confess I don't remember / didn't catch the details, but it was
something to do with some low level Rust types and I think the concern that
the TZDB IDs are quite long and not that friendly for IoT devices. It's
well off topic for this thread, but I thought I'd mention in case there is
any appetite for TZDB to become the authority for that too, i.e. perhaps it
could also master a new set of aliases for zone IDs with length / stability
guarantees. This is highly speculative on my part.

Neil.


On Tue, 13 Apr 2021 at 19:52, Guy Harris <gharris at sonic.net> wrote:

> On Apr 13, 2021, at 7:26 AM, Neil Fuller via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:
>
> > All that said, metazones could perhaps be ignored as an implementation
> detail used to derive a name for a zone ID.
>
> Perhaps the tzdb *should* maintain a notion of "metazones", giving them
> names; it would leave it up to the CLDR to assign localized abbreviations
> and display names for them.
>


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