[tz] Please Don't Feed the Trolls (was Kyiv not Kiev)
Guy Harris
gharris at sonic.net
Thu Jun 30 19:11:01 UTC 2022
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.)
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