Re: [PATCH] Remove locale timezone information

[keld at keldix dot com]

On Wed, Aug 05, 2015 at 09:20:14AM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> 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).

It is always interesting with strange stories. Was there a differnce between German
an Swiss timezones? Something with Switzerland not being EU?
As written in earlier posts, you can always override standard TZ values in specific
cases. For travelling, I see no problem, at least I travel a lot, and I have
my local time changed easily. However all my timestamps are kept in UTC and in seconds
since the Epoch. Where do you see problems, Paul?

And my mother told me that "two" is not "many". Both your examples are for countries
with two timezones, and I guess that one of them are the one that the majority
will use. And then even for the minority, it will help them to just pick number two,
and not have to pick amongst myriads of timezones.

> 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 "????????????" 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.

I take your word on timezone names, Paul, as I consider you close to the horse's mouth.
Good to know that the city names are only meant to be internal.
Still we need to convey that info to many developers on Linux install procedures, then.

CLDR was built with input from 14652, They killed it and tried to take over the info
of it and 15897. Embrace and  enhance. I will have a look on CLDR timezone names.

Best regards
Keld