<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div dir="auto">Actually this Canadian is quite ok with CA for the country code. We are familiar with it as our domain name extension</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">CA/ON/Ottawa works.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div id="composer_signature" dir="auto"><div style="font-size:85%;color:#575757" dir="auto">Sent from my Galaxy</div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div><br></div><div align="left" dir="auto" style="font-size:100%;color:#000000"><div>-------- Original message --------</div><div>From: Brian Park via tz <tz@iana.org> </div><div>Date: 2021-11-05 17:54 (GMT-05:00) </div><div>To: Ken Murchison <murch@fastmail.com> </div><div>Cc: IANA TZ Database <tz@iana.org> </div><div>Subject: Re: [tz] Pre-1970 data </div><div><br></div></div><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></div><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif" class="gmail_default">On Fri, Nov 5, 2021 at 12:01 PM Brian Park <<a href="mailto:brian@xparks.net">brian@xparks.net</a>> wrote:<br></div></div><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex" class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></div><div class="gmail_quote"><div><div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">I agree that it is conceptually cleaner if the Core TZDB identifiers were internal only. But I understand that some people would consider ISO-country identifiers to be out of scope of this project, although there are many ad hoc ones currently in the database. I think a file like 'countryzone' should be added only if there are people willing to maintain such a list. It may need to be a separate project, to avoid forcing the TZ Coordinator to pick up the slack if those maintainers drop off.<br></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Following up my own post, I took an initial stab at what this 'countryzone' file would look like, and immediately ran into problems that convinces me that this does *not* belong in the TZDB project. The scope seems too large, so it seems better as a separate project.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">I started from an ISO-3166 CSV file (see <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_3166_country_codes">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_3166_country_codes</a> for a human readable version), and I found: </div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">1) Many country names are too long to fit into 14 characters. Let's say we relax that constraint because we deprecate support for any old Unix system that cannot support these longer file names. But there are countries like "Heard Island and McDonald Islands", "South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands", and "United States Minor Outlying Islands", and "British Indian Ocean Territory". Just from an ergonomics perspective, we should find a way to shorten these very long names.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">2) If we shorten some countries, like "Bosnia and Herzegovina" to just "Bosnia" for convenience, are we going to offend people? I don't know anyone from Bosnia and Herzegovina, so I have no idea. Each country that we shorten needs to be researched carefully.<br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">3) At least 5 countries have non-ASCII characters in their ISO names: "Côte d'Ivoire ", "Curaçao", "Åland Islands", "Saint Barthélemy", "Réunion". Personally, I would like to use only ASCII characters because they are the lowest common denominator that is guaranteed to work, outside of mainframes using EBCDIC. If we remove these non-ASCII characters, are we going to offend the people of those countries, even though these are supposed to be English versions of their country names?</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">4) So maybe the solution is to use 2-letter or 3-letter ISO codes, instead of the shortened, quasi-English versions of the country names. So we get things like "CA/Eastern" or "CAN/Eastern", instead of "Canada/Eastern". Not very satisfying for Canadians or many other countries (except for Americans whose ISO codes "US" and "USA" match their colloquial usage perfectly).</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">All this before we even get to the work of mapping various ISO countries (and their subregions if needed) to their corresponding canonical TZDB identifiers.<br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">With regards to pre-1970 data in 'backzone', I'll see if I can do some exploratory work on the 'backzone'/'mergedzone' pairing next week, and determine if there are any major problems with the idea.<br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Brian<br></div></div></div>
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