[tz] Please Don't Feed the Trolls (was Kyiv not Kiev)

[Guy Harris]

On Jun 30, 2022, at 11:55 AM, Paul Gilmartin via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> On Jun 30, 2022, at 11:26:03, Doug Ewell via tz wrote:
>> 
>> Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
>> 
>>> I just experimented, and apparently, MacOS no longer accepts Kiev,
>>> only Kyiv.  Score one for the petitioners. :)
>> 
> I'm astonished.

I just figured he tried the "closest city" picker rather than looking at /usr/share/zoneinfo; that is, in fact, what happened.

The closest city" picker, blessedly, does not do anything silly such as using the tree under /usr/share/zoneinfo as a list of choices.  Would that more systems also avoided doing that.

>> If this means that macOS accepts "Europe/Kyiv" as a tz-style time zone, but does not support "Europe/Kiev", then this would be a very unusual sort of breaking change, since no tz database version beyond 2022a has been released yet.
>> 
> Generally, the historic name is preserved with a symbolic link.
> 
> Peculiarly, MacOS doesn't use symlinks in zoneinfo but replicates the files,
> despite that MacOS freely uses symlinks elsewhere.
> 
> The extra storage is inconsequential.  But, still, perhaps Deborah Goldsmith
> can relieve my puzzlement.

See my email.  "Kyiv" and not "Kiev" is what the Apple "closest city" picker in 13.0 beta 2 (and, presumably, 12.4 - 12.3.1 accepts both) supports when choosing a time zone.  Its tzdb still has Europe/Kiev but not Europe/Kyiv.

When the next tzdb release comes out, and Apple provides it, the historic name will presumably be preserved either with a symlink or a copy.

(Deborah, any idea why symlinks aren't used?  /usr/share/zoneinfo, on 12.3.1, is a symlink to /var/db/timezone/zoneinfo, and /var/db/timezone/zoneinfo is, in turn, a symlink to /var/db/timezone/tz/2022a.1.0/zoneinfo, so it's not as if there's a complete refusal to use symlinks there.)