[tz] Pacific islands as identifiers

[Paul Eggert]

On 10/21/22 19:14, Paul-Cathy Unger via tz wrote:
> I'm wondering what the rationale is for using island / province names for some Pacific nations and city names for others

When I chose those names decades ago, I preferred island names as I 
figured they would be easier for most users to recognize and/or 
remember. However, I chose a city name when the island name was 
ambiguous (e.g., Samoa) or when the island is so large that a time zone 
split is plausible (e.g., New Guinea). Guadalcanal is neither large nor 
ambiguously named, so I used the island name in that case.

I just now set the time zone on Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS, and it gave me a 
little map of the world that I clicked on; there was no drop down list 
of names in the traditional sense. Perhaps you can ask your distro 
maintainers to use that part of Ubuntu, as TZDB names are not meant for 
general user consumption. For more info, please see 
<https://data.iana.org/time-zones/theory.html#naming>, which says. 
'Inexperienced users are not expected to select these names unaided. 
Distributors should provide documentation and/or a simple selection 
interface that explains each name via a map or via descriptive text like 
"Czech Republic" instead of the timezone name "|Europe/Prague|".' If the 
name's user-visible explanation or description is inappropriate, you 
might try writing to whoever maintains that (it's probably not us...).