[tz] Moving more zones to 'backzone'

Guy Harris gharris at sonic.net
Wed Aug 17 07:21:06 UTC 2022


On Aug 16, 2022, at 11:28 PM, Peter Krefting via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> My thinking is to display the country names as the top selection entry, as
> most people know the country they live in, and for the vast majority that is
> enough (special care has to be taken for the multi-zone countries).

Note that the multi-zone countries that are in the top 20 list by population in the Wikipedia list of countries by population, with the exception of China (see below) have about 1.1B people, and several of those in the top 20 list are significant (US, Indonesia, Russia, and Mexico, for example), so that special care definitely should be taken.

(Canada and Australia don't make that top-20 list, but they're also multi-zone.)

And the comment for Asia/Urumqi says:

# Xinjiang Time is well-documented as being officially recognized.  E.g., see
# "The Working-Calendar for The Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Government"
# <http://www.sinkiang.gov.cn/service/ourworking/> (2014-04-22).
# Unfortunately, we have no good records of time in Xinjiang before 1986.
# During the 20th century parts of Xinjiang were ruled by the Qing dynasty,
# the Republic of China, various warlords, the First and Second East Turkestan
# Republics, the Soviet Union, the Kuomintang, and the People's Republic of
# China, and tracking down all these organizations' timekeeping rules would be  
# quite a trick.  Approximate this lost history by a transition from LMT to
# UT +06 at the start of 1928, the year of accession of the warlord Jin Shuren,
# which happens to be the date given by Shanks & Pottenger (no doubt as a
# guess) as the transition from LMT.  Ignore the usage of +08 before
# 1986-02-01 under the theory that the transition date to +08 is unknown and
# that the sort of users who prefer Asia/Urumqi now typically ignored the
# +08 mandate back then.

which sounds as if it'd add another 1.4B people, and a very significant world power, to the multi-zone list, even if only a small fraction of those people would use Xinjiang Time.


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