[tz] What data should TZDB offer?

[Fred Gleason]

On Jun 7, 2021, at 10:53, Stephen Colebourne via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> "what people in a region think" is essentially unknowable. What
> governmental authorities define is generally well recorded. Where we
> can accurately fnd data to indicate that a region is not following the
> lead of the governmental authorities then I agree we need to make sure
> that those people's experience can be expressed in some form by TZDB.
> But I think that governmental authorities so dominate the field of
> timezones, and what our downstream users perceive of timezones, that
> we need to reflect it. Putting our heads in the sand and pretending
> that governmental authorities don't exist is not helpful.

Other than Asia/Urumqi, I’m hard pressed to call to mind a region where a significant section of the population has basically decided to defy all governmental authority. However, there are areas where *which* governmental authority is relevant is a very live question (the Crimea comes to mind immediately). The “what people in a region think” standard allows TZDB to avoid taking sides about which political entity is the “legitimate” one.

Cheers!


|---------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. |             Chief Developer             |
|                           |             Paravel Systems             |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------|
|         A room without books is like a body without a soul.         |
|                                                                     |
|                                                         -- Cicero   |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------|

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/attachments/20210607/3bd8819d/attachment.htm>