[tz] Request for Change of Time Zone Name from Asia/Ho_Chi_Minh to Asia/Ha_Noi

[Doug Ewell]

Guy Harris wrote:

> And, once again, I note that tzids Should. Not. Be. Exposed. To. The.
> Majority. Of. Users.

This is one of the more important reasons not to change tzids, the actual identifiers: they’re intended for machines, not humans.

Humans care about cultural, national, or civic pride; they care which city is the political capital of its nation or which boasts the larger population; they care that a name is spelled “correctly” so as to reflect preferred, modern, natural-language usage and to avoid the appearance of influence by the “wrong” culture or language.

Machines don’t care about any of that, but they do care whether the identifier in the database matches the one stored in the environment, or in the translation package that maps identifiers to truly human-readable names. If the identifier for a given time zone is changed, those associations may be broken (hint: not all software that uses tzids understands links, or otherwise uses the full tz software package) and the utility of the tzid is reduced to zero. It is no different from taking a line of code like “int foo = 5;” and changing “foo” to “bar”, while leaving other references in the code to “foo” untouched.

Identifiers are sometimes changed like this to reflect official city name changes, or to reflect updated spellings in “common English practice,” which really belies the claim that they are not meant for human consumption. If they are indeed not, as Guy says, then there should be exceedingly few reasons to ever change an existing tzid.

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Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org