[tz] Pre-1970 data

[Magnus Fromreide]

On Sat, Nov 06, 2021 at 11:19:28PM -0700, Watson Ladd wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 6, 2021 at 12:55 AM Magnus Fromreide via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Nov 05, 2021 at 02:53:23PM -0700, Brian Park via tz wrote:
> > > On Fri, Nov 5, 2021 at 12:01 PM Brian Park <brian at xparks.net> wrote:
> > >
> > > > I agree that it is conceptually cleaner if the Core TZDB identifiers were
> > > > internal only. But I understand that some people would consider ISO-country
> > > > identifiers to be out of scope of this project, although there are many ad
> > > > hoc ones currently in the database. I think a file like 'countryzone'
> > > > should be added only if there are people willing to maintain such a list.
> > > > It may need to be a separate project, to avoid forcing the TZ Coordinator
> > > > to pick up the slack if those maintainers drop off.
> > > >
> > >
> > > Following up my own post, I took an initial stab at what this 'countryzone'
> > > file would look like, and immediately ran into problems that convinces me
> > > that this does *not* belong in the TZDB project. The scope seems too large,
> > > so it seems better as a separate project.
> > >
> > > I started from an ISO-3166 CSV file (see
> > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_3166_country_codes for a human
> > > readable version), and I found:
> > >
> > > 1) Many country names are too long to fit into 14 characters. Let's say we
> > > relax that constraint because we deprecate support for any old Unix system
> > > that cannot support these longer file names. But there are countries like
> > > "Heard Island and McDonald Islands", "South Georgia and the South Sandwich
> > > Islands", and "United States Minor Outlying Islands", and "British Indian
> > > Ocean Territory". Just from an ergonomics perspective, we should find a way
> > > to shorten these very long names.
> > >
> > > 2) If we shorten some countries, like "Bosnia and Herzegovina" to just
> > > "Bosnia" for convenience, are we going to offend people? I don't know
> > > anyone from Bosnia and Herzegovina, so I have no idea. Each country that we
> > > shorten needs to be researched carefully.
> > >
> > > 3) At least 5 countries have non-ASCII characters in their ISO names: "Côte
> > > d'Ivoire ", "Curaçao", "Åland Islands", "Saint Barthélemy", "Réunion".
> > > Personally, I would like to use only ASCII characters because they are the
> > > lowest common denominator that is guaranteed to work, outside of mainframes
> > > using EBCDIC. If we remove these non-ASCII characters, are we going to
> > > offend the people of those countries, even though these are supposed to be
> > > English versions of their country names?
> >
> > This also brings up the question about why any of the subregion
> > identifiers should be included? They are not countries and I find it
> > hard to defend that Jan Mayen (population: 4 (scientists on the
> > weather station)) should have it's own time zone when the US state
> > of e.g. Texas shouldn't.
> 
> Because Texas has never had a different time from other entries in the
> DB, while Jan Mayen has.

I will happily admit to not having done any deeper research than reading
the comments in europe and backzone but both Arctic/Longyearbyen and
Atlantic/Jan_Mayen seems to be links to Europe/Oslo and that is all the
history they have.

What I was after though, was that Svalbard & Jan Mayen do have an ISO
country code - SJ - but that country code is rightfully marked as a
region code in iso 3166. I do not know why some places get their own
3166 region codes but I suppose it is a thing for autonomus regions.

/MF