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

Philip Paeps philip at trouble.is
Sun May 23 01:42:20 UTC 2021


On 2021-05-23 02:33:22 (+0800), Paul Eggert wrote:
> 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.

While those timestamps are out of scope, software exists that is aware 
of tzdb names but not the intricate details of POSIX TZ strings.  There 
are use cases where being able to set a fixed-offset timezone is 
desired.  Breaking the current behaviour for pre-1970 timestamps would 
not be cool.

I'd even suggest documenting explicitly that Etc/* are aliases for fixed 
offsets.

>> 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.

(I assume Indian/Reunion. :))

I agree that this should not be a concern.

Philip

-- 
Philip Paeps
Senior Reality Engineer
Alternative Enterprises


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