[tz] Preparing to fork tzdb

[Kim Davies]

Quoting dpatte via tz on Tuesday September 21, 2021:
> Incorrect..Iso 3166
> Ramallah is recognized in the State of Palestine.
> Sevastopol is recognized as a city as being in Ukraine.
> If you disagree politically, you can raise your issue with the iso.

ISO 3166 only encodes countries/territories, and subnational divisions
of those entities that are supplied by the respective governments. Most
of those subnational divisons are administrative regions like states
and they are not necessarily comprehenseive. The standard does not
specify boundaries for those subdivisions, and I don't think it would
be decisive between conflicting claims (e.g. Western Sahara is encoded
independently, but also as entities like Laayoune within Morocco)

While ISO 3166 may do a heavy lift in this area and move the dispute
over what is a country to another entity, it won't solve a lot of
geographic coding problems.

kim