[tz] [PROPOSED] Merge timezones that are alike since 1970
Paul Eggert
eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Sat May 29 18:43:31 UTC 2021
On 5/29/21 2:00 AM, Stephen Colebourne via tz wrote:
>> > Why should we maintain Norway and Sweden's
>> > time zone histories, when we don't maintain the histories for
>> > Guangdong, KwaZulu-Natal, Thanh Hóa, or Uttar Pradesh?
>
> Because they are regions of the same country!
Thanh Hóa is not in the same country as Bangkok (Asia/Bangkok's
most-populous location).
> merging zones across modern countries isn't acceptable.
The practice is clearly acceptable, as tzdb's zones have crossed
national boundaries for decades in some cases (as I mentioned in an
earlier email). Unfortunately we haven't been consistent about this, and
our lack of consistency has led to understandable charges of political
favoritism.
If we insisted on creating a new zone every time there was a different
country, we'd have a more-complicated database and get into even bigger
political messes than we already have. There was an example of this
recently in the complaint about why there is no separate tzdb entry for
Kosovo. I endured quite a bit of vitriol in private email about this.
In the long run we are better off decoupling tzdb entries from political
issues as much as we can. This will lessen the probability of similar
vitriol (or worse) in the future.
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