[tz] Moving more zones to 'backzone'

[Peter Krefting]

Stephen Colebourne via tz:

> What this does is push the problem to downstream projects. My hope is
> that downstream users will understand and appreciate that:
>
> - Iceland's time zone now points at Africa/Abidjan
> - Sweden's time zone data now points at Europe/Berlin
> - Norway's time zone data now points at Europe/Berlin
> - Netherland's time-zone data now points at Europe/Brussels
> and many more.

The removal of the data isn't so much of a problem as trying to 
explain to users what they get. In the system I am writing, I am using 
zone1970.tab as the source for time zones, using the time zone name 
(sans continent) and the description. I sort time zones on current 
time, so it is fairly easy to find the zones that correspond to the 
current location as long as the system time is correct.

The problem is trying to understand which time zone to pick when none 
of the cities in your country are listed. Windows already has this 
problem with its time zone picker, it has a couple of time zones that 
cover CET, none that list any cities or contries that are relevant to 
me, so I just have to pick one at random. Moving the TZDB in that 
direction is not the best solution.

I have been considering switching to global-tz for the next update, 
but I just realize that it has the same zone1970.tab file as regular 
tz, so that will not help at all (I am writing for an embedded system 
where we cut off old data from before build time, as it does not 
preserve information across reboots in anything but fully written-out 
text form).

-- 
\\// Peter - http://www.softwolves.pp.se/