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

Clive D.W. Feather clive at davros.org
Sat May 22 22:27:46 UTC 2021


Brian Inglis via tz said:
> 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.

+2 agreed.

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather          | If you lie to the compiler,
Email: clive at davros.org     | it will get its revenge.
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