[tz] Preparing to fork tzdb

[Stephen Colebourne]

On Tue, 21 Sept 2021 at 20:54, Paul Eggert via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:
>
> On 9/21/21 12:47 PM, Garrett Wollman wrote:
> >> That sort of argument would be valid only if one accepted as an axiom
> >> that countries (or states) are an inherent part of timekeeping.
> > Governments self-evidently are: they are why we even have time zones
> > in the first place.
>
> Of course governments determine civil-time rules, and these rules
> determine what goes into tzdb. But that does not mean that tzdb must
> include Zones for Utah, Idaho, Montana etc. merely because Arizona has
> an Zone.

Straw man. Literally no one has suggested this.


If you don't like ISO countries as the basis of a rule, feel free to
suggest something else.

If you want to resolve the issue you need a rule that doesn't end up
with users in Norway or Sweden requesting the time-zone for 1950 and
getting the zone information of Germany instead. It is this aspect of
the patch that is so utterly repulsive that months of wasted energy
has been spent to get it reverted.

IMO the defining characteristic of what is or is not acceptable to
merge zones across is ISO country boundaries. But I'd love to hear an
alternate idea.

Stephen