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

Brian Inglis Brian.Inglis at SystematicSw.ab.ca
Sat May 22 21:32:28 UTC 2021


On 2021-05-22 14:10, Tom Lane via tz wrote:
> Paul Eggert via tz <tz at iana.org> writes:
>> 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.

> That seems really bad.  If I ask for Etc/GMT+4, I should get a fixed
> GMT+4 offset for all time, not whatever the heck Bolivia's pre-1970
> behavior was.  Those zone names are not, or at least should not be,
> conditional on political decisions.  IMO, Etc/GMT+4 is just an
> alternative way to spell the '<-04>4' notation ... one that could
> be very handy if dealing with software that knows the tzdb names
> but not POSIX notation.

+1 agreed - please *NEVER* merge fixed offset and political zones!
They are not the same thing and a little duplication to avoid errors is good.
I think I will also add local links with the expected offsets for Etc/UTC+-#
to POSIX Etc/GMT-+#, to my current local links of phonetic and military zones.

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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