[tz] [PROPOSED] Merge timezones that are alike since 1970

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Sat May 22 18:33:22 UTC 2021


On 5/22/21 11:17 AM, Tim Parenti wrote:
> In particular, the latter group (things
> like America/La_Paz -> Etc/GMT+4) seems to encourage things or behaviors
> which historically cause confusion, especially for novices:

We could avoid these problems by merging Etc/GMT+4 into America/La_Paz 
rather than vice versa. That would be easy to arrange, and would result 
in the same number of timezones. A downside would be that TZ='Etc/GMT+4' 
would no longer be equivalent to TZ='<-04>4' for pre-1970 timestamps, 
but those timestamps are out of scope anyway.

> if any of the resulting pairings are particularly
> far-flung (I haven't checked thoroughly yet)

Some are far-flung but that should be OK. It shouldn't matter, for 
example, that Asia/Dubai and Asia/Reunion are aliases even though Dubai 
and Réunion are separated by 5000 km of ocean and disparate political 
systems. Users of those aliases shouldn't care, any more than users of 
Europe/Copenhagen and Europe/Berlin should care.


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