[bombcar]

They usually work because people check and notice mistakes.

It gets worse now that you have countries next to each other that are out of sync on daylight saving - America/Los Angeles doesn’t work for those south of the border anymore - but you won’t notice except two weeks a year.

Strangely I’ve noticed some systems give you WAY more cities than in the standard library - and I’m not sure why. Linode had way more options than just America/Chicago but didn’t have St Paul.

And trying to schedule things in advance across the daylight saving time difference is even more confusing.

[tlb]

Before about 1920, many US cities had their own time. Since then, there are far fewer time zones, mostly uniform across states, and named after a large city. Similarly in other countries. The large version of the database is only needed if you're trying to print very old dates.