It sounds to me like this whole thing is based on Paul Eggert trying to preemptively avoid the political question of "what is a country?". He says in one of the threads [1]: There is a distinction, though, between tz mailing-list politics (the focus of much of the recent
discussion) and real-world politics (things like, "is Kosovo a country?"). My main worry is the
latter not the former, in that I think it's worth making minor technical changes to tzdb now to
help forestall potentially major real-world political problems down the road, problems
that could be worse than being sued by astrologers. Admittedly not everyone sees things this way.
...the elephant no one seems to be talking about as the canonical example of the question is Taiwan.Rather than get wrapped around the political axle of whether Taiwan counts as a country for purposes of inclusion in the timezone db, it sounds like he wants to just set up a system where tzdb says "here's a time zone that's identified by its biggest city." That way if Taiwan is listed, it's only because it happened to be the biggest city in its timezone, not because the tzdb is making any political statement about its political status. That's understandable from a certain point of view, but I think it's doomed to failure for a couple reasons: 1) the tzdb never did this in the past, so it's a huge change to the default behavior. Changing the world's timezone names is an enormous change, that will break an f-ton of stuff, so downstream folks are understandably unhappy about it. The moment something important breaks because a system couldn't find "US/Eastern" is the moment this either gets reverted or forked. 2) You may not want to play the political game, but it wants to play with you. City/territory names aren't neutral, either, and are just as political (Derry/Londonderry), so relying on city names doesn't actually solve the problem, it just makes it less likely. I suspect they're going to have to stick with countries, and let IANA make the determination of what's a country, so they don't have to have gigantic political fights, they can defer to IANA policy. [1]: https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-June/030177.html |
The controversial solution to this is that all places with equal timezones since 1970 have been merged to share a single zone with the pre-1970 history of the largest place in that zone (which might not be valid for the whole zone). There are backward-compatibility links provided so that the old zone names still work, and there was a pre-existing build option to include all known (but incomplete) pre-1970 data, which splits the zones again.
Opponents of that change argue that instead of consolidating currently-alike zones, every currently-existing country should get their own zone with the pre-1970 history of the largest place in that zone (which, again, might not be valid for the whole zone). To do this correctly would of course require someone to volunteer the pre-1970 data for zones that would be split, which notably no one seems to have done yet.
What's most remarkable to me as an outsider is about how incredible niche the usecase where this makes a difference is: you have to be interested in pre-1970 timestamps, but build tzdb without enabling the pre-1970 historic data.