[tz] Pre-1970 data

[Mark Davis ☕️]

Two different issues are being confused.

1. Don't have timezone IDs span country countries (specifically for,* country
code*).
2. Use a short English name of countries in the timezone IDs.

#1 former I fully agree with. The
https://www.ietf.org/timezones/tzdb-2021e/zone1970.tab file goes a long way
in this direction, and it wouldn't be hard to add some timezone IDs with
Links to complete the set. Countries are important entities (denying that
feels like https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence). While it may seem
pointless to add timezone IDs for some rocks like Heard and McDonald
Islands, there are only a few of those, and for testing purposes it is
better to be complete.

Note: I like the previous proposal to cleanly distinguish between those
Links that are between IDs that really refer to the same place (just
different spelling or name), and those that refer to different places.
Alternatively, a step that would also serve to disambiguate, would be to
have approximate coordinates for *each* timezone ID (not just the ones in
the zone table); IDs with the same coordinates would have the 'same place'
links.

#2 is disruptive, and serves no purpose. The timezone IDs are no more than
internal IDs, with a bit of mnemonic flavor just for internal recognition.
No real implementation should present them to users; especially outside of
the Anglosphere.

Mark


On Fri, Nov 5, 2021 at 3:11 PM Guy Harris via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> On Nov 5, 2021, at 2:53 PM, Brian Park via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:
>
> > 4) So maybe the solution is to use 2-letter or 3-letter ISO codes,
> instead of the shortened, quasi-English versions of the country names. So
> we get things like "CA/Eastern" or "CAN/Eastern", instead of
> "Canada/Eastern". Not very satisfying for Canadians or many other countries
> (except for Americans whose ISO codes "US" and "USA" match their colloquial
> usage perfectly).
> >
> > All this before we even get to the work of mapping various ISO countries
> (and their subregions if needed) to their corresponding canonical TZDB
> identifiers.
>
> And "subregions" means more than just "time zone names" - Arizone isn't in
> the same tzdb region as Utah, so "US/Mountain" isn't sufficient here.
> I.e., even picking names for country/subregion combinations is going to
> involve some work and some decision-making.  (And, while "US/Arizona" might
> work, "US/Indiana" won't - look for "Indiana" in the northamerica file.
> Then look at the whole Canada section - CA/{zone name} isn't going to
> suffice, either.)
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