[tz] Ecuador time zone list

David mailing at pov.es
Mon Sep 19 13:00:57 UTC 2022


Thank you for your reply.

It is more or less what I was expecting, but I need to correct you on 
the population data you have seen. Quito, both the city and metro areas 
are bigger than Guayaquil. Albeit not by much.

My argument and whole point was that from an end-user point of view, 
when choosing a city to select a time zone for Ecuador Guayaquil will 
not be the first choice. And I am pretty sure that in a huge proportion 
of cases it won't be the second either.

I am embarrassed to admit, that despite being familiar with Ecuador, I 
ended up choosing another country in my settings. It took an OS upgrade 
for this to bother me enough to look into it deeper and find about 
Guayaquil. I can't extrapolate my own experience to all users, but I 
would be surprised to have been the only one.


On 19/09/2022 13:19, Robert Elz wrote:
>      Date:        Mon, 19 Sep 2022 11:21:37 +0100
>      From:        David via tz <tz at iana.org>
>      Message-ID:  <39316283-6bc5-cd01-f7d0-a1c61f44bad5 at pov.es>
> 
>    | Ecuador has currently two time zones, one for the mainland, and
>    | another for the Galapagos Islands.
> 
> Yes.
> 
>    | The city that is listed for the mainland is Guayaquil, with no mention
>    | of the capital Quito.
> 
> Being the capital is irrelevant.   We also do not have Washington,
> Ottawa, Beijing, or New Delhi as zone names for zones in the USA, Canada,
> China, or India, but rather New York (which isn't even the capital of
> its state), Toronto, Shanghai, and Kolkata instead.
> 
>    | Guayaquil is the second most populous city in Ecuador,
> 
> The population data I have seen suggests it is the most populous,
> at about 2 million people, with Quito second, at about 1.4 million.
> 
> Certainly deciding what exactly is to be counted as being the city for
> these purposes isn't always simple, and relative populations do alter
> over time, but once a city is chosen as the name for a zone, being
> consistent means that we rarely change.
> 
> (Eg: it may be that the population of Beijing is now greater than, or
> at least, similar to, that of Shanghai - but it wasn't when the name
> was chosen).
> 
>    | but why it is the only city listed is odd.
> 
> There is only one (as we understand, and you confirmed above) mainland
> timezone.   The timezone and its data is what is important, not its name.
> One zone needs only one name.
> 
> This project has (long ago) decided to pick the name of the most populous
> city/town to use the timezone in question as the name of the zone, and
> by that rule, and the population data available, Guayaquil is it.
> 
>    | It is akin to choosing Marseilles as the only city for France instead of
>    | Paris.
> 
> Paris is more populous than Marseilles.   As is London than Birmingham.
> Capitals are often (but not always) the biggest city, so it happens that
> the names of capitals are chosen as timezone names quite frequently, but
> it has nothing at all do do with them being the capital.
> 
>    | Is there any chance of having Quito added?
> 
> Not a lot I suspect.    But if you have some particular desire to have
> that happen locally (if you ever really normally ever see the zone name)
> you can simply make a link (or copy) of the zone data file (the TZif file).
> 
> kre
> 


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