[tz] Kyiv not Kiev

[Ian Abbott]

On 27/06/2022 16:45, Petro Ord via tz wrote:
> I have checked past discussions and all the answers are about Kyiv not 
> being a common English word.

It wasn't until relatively recently, but has been gradually growing in 
popularity since 2018.  With recent events in 2022 it appears to have 
become more popular than the old name in the English language (at least 
when referring to the Ukrainian capital city, and not when referring to 
chicken recipes where I suspect the old name is still more popular). 
That is why the current development version of the TZ database was 
updated on April 13 this year, and the change will appear in the next 
release.

> If people are still writing to you about the same error it means your 
> statement about "Kyiv is NOT a common word" is wrong.
> Pertinent is the number of such requests, and this number is unknown. 
> Even when I wrote mine, I saw another one has submitted the same, which 
> only states that it is not just a typo, it's a bug.

Changes to existing zone names are rare, and significant.  You may 
consider it a bug, but it does not break anything, unlike changes to 
timekeeping rules.  The old name still works.  After the next version of 
the TZ database has been released and installed locally, people can 
switch over to using "Europe/Kyiv" if they want to.  Until then, they 
should continue using the old name since that is the one that is 
installed.  After release, the old name should also continue to work for 
backwards compatibility, at least on those distributions that do install 
the links from old names to new names.

TZ releases do have hidden costs in the IT industry, so the maintainer 
only tends to do a new release when absolutely necessary but ideally 
allowing plenty of time for timekeeping rules to percolate through the 
various 3rd-party distributors to the end-user devices.  Regrettably for 
you, name changes are not deemed important enough by themselves to 
require an expedited release.  If a more urgent reason for a release 
comes along, the name change will be released at the same time.

None of the above prohibits anyone from making and installing their own 
release.  It just won't be the official release.

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