Re: [PATCH] Remove locale timezone information

[Paul Eggert <eggert at cs dot ucla dot edu>]

On 08/05/2015 03:22 AM, keld@keldix.com wrote:
> For countries with more timezones, the locale data helps narrowing down the
> choices. And there are not that many countries with more than 1 timezone,
> eg USA, Canada, Russia and Greenland. Many big countries like China and India
> only have 1 timezone

Actually, China has two time zones: tzdata's Asia/Shanghai and 
Asia/Urumqi both reflect officially-kept time.  Even Germany has more 
than one tzdata entry, due to the a difference in post-1970 history of 
timekeeping in its Swiss enclaves.  So the problem of many time zones 
for one locale is bigger than what you're suggesting, even if we ignore 
traveling users (which is a pretty big class to ignore).

As for tzdata names "not being culturally acceptable", they are intended 
for use as internal identifiers, visible to experts like us but not to 
end users, so "cultural acceptability" should not be an issue.  End 
users in China, for example, are not expected to see "Asia/Shanghai" 
even in an English locale, but instead are expected to see "China 
Standard Time" or "Beijing Time" or something like that.  Strings like 
"China Standard Time" and "åäæé" are maintained by the Unicode 
Common Locale Data Repository <http://cldr.unicode.org/> and are widely 
used in glibc-based systems.  I don't know whether CLDR supports ISO TR 
14652 and 30112, but if it doesn't then I suggest approaching the CLDR 
maintainers.