[tz] About missing country in your Time Zone Database?

[Paul Eggert]

On 5/5/21 11:27 AM, Sadiku, Besnik via tz wrote:
> I ... noticed that Kosovo is missing in the Time Zone Database list.

Good eye. However, although tzdb originally had entries for most 
countries, an entry is no longer needed if a country's clocks agree with 
a neighboring region since 1970; see 
<https://data.iana.org/time-zones/theory.html#naming>. The helps 
insulate tzdb somewhat from political issues.

tzdb 2021a does have entries like Europe/Ljubljana that are aliases for 
Europe/Belgrade. However, these are not present in the zone1970.tab file 
that lists primary tzdb identifiers. As I believe I've mentioned earlier 
on this mailing list, at some point I should get around to moving those 
links to the 'backward' file since they're present only for 
backward-compatibility with earlier tzdb guidelines.


Come to think of it, instead of continuing to put this off let's do it. 
This shouldn't affect most distros, which use the default setup with 
'backward'; if anybody's not using 'backward' now's as good a time as 
any to start using it, if one cares about compatibility.

So I installed the attached proposed patches into the development 
version of tzdb on GitHub. The last patch adds a comment about Kosovo at 
the appropriate alphabetical location in the 'europe' file.
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