<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">On Fri, Nov 5, 2021 at 8:47 AM Eliot Lear <<a href="mailto:lear@lear.ch" target="_blank">lear@lear.ch</a>> wrote:<br></div></div><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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<div>On 05.11.21 16:26, Brian Park via tz
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">Can
you explain why [no ISO countries]? Because it will cause
arguments about disputed places? I think only a small minority of
places around the world are disputed.</blockquote>
<p>Over the time I have been following this group:</p>
<ul>
<li>YAR, South Yemen -> Yemen<br>
</li>
<li>Zaire -> DRC</li>
<li>East Germany, West Germany -> Germany<br>
</li>
<li>Yugoslavia -> Croatia, Serbia & Montenegro, Bosnia
Herzegovina, Slovenia, Macedonia</li>
<li>Serbia & Montenegro -> Serbia, Montenegro</li>
<li>Serbia -> Serbia & Kosovo</li>
<li>Macedonia -> Northern Macedonia</li>
<li>Czechoslovakia, The Czech Republic, Slovakia</li>
<li>Czech Republic -> Czechia</li>
<li>Sudan -> Sudan, South Sudan</li>
<li>And then there's Russia and the Ukraine</li>
<li>Israel & Palestine<br>
</li>
<li>And South Africa and Namibia</li>
</ul>
<p>I'm sure I'm missing a few.<br>
</p>
<p>You may say that these are a minority of nations, but these
changes have NOT by themselves necessitated ANY work on the part
of this project. That is a feature. To be clear, that work would
involve someone taking a political stance, even if that means
supporting UN decisions (that's a political decision). </p></div></blockquote><div> </div><div>Thanks for the historical context, <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">this is</span> a good list to have.</div><div><br></div><div>It looks like some of those are name changes, and some of those are disputed regions. I think we <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">would be able to</span> create appropriate policies to govern the various situations. With my proposal of refactoring the ISO-country timezones into a separate 'countryzone' file, the churn would be isolated to that file.</div><div><br></div><div><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Perhaps
there is a difference in perspective as well. As a downstream library
maintainer, I almost always try to be an advocate of the end-users. I
try to ask myself, "How can I make things easier for my users?", instead
of "How can I make things easier for me, or the TZDB maintainers?" I understand the advantages of an abstract organization of timezones to prevent churn. But the lack of ISO-country based timezones causes a suboptimal experience for the end-users. We can solve that problem using a thin mapping layer on top of the more abstract timezone identifiers. </span> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div><p>Better to
stick with what we have: observe what people on the ground think
the time is.<br>
</p>
</div></blockquote><div><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">I've seen this a few times, but I don't understand it. No normal person on the ground thinks their time is "America/Los_Angeles". It's "US/Pacific". <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">No normal person in Toronto thinks their time is "America/Toronto". Their country is not even America. They think their timezone is "Canada/Eastern". People</span> are forced to use "America/Los_Angeles" or "America/Toronto" because the TZDB forced that nomenclature upon our users. It seems a mapping layer, like the 'countryzone' file containing ISO-countries, would be the one that provides the timezones that people use on the ground.<br></span></div><div><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></span></div><div><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></span></div></div></div>