[WorldMaker]

https://www.icann.org/en/blogs/details/how-time-zones-are-co...

Hopefully the British would be kind enough to email the TZ DB group at the IANA ([e-mail]) a couple years in advance of the legislation to change the name so that the group can get started on collecting the DST rules for Europe/NewNewYork. Some people and devices will probably stick to Europe/Paris out of habit and/or resistance to the change, so the TZ DB would probably be unlikely to remove it, but they may point references from it to Europe/NewNewYork as the new "canonical" name. Plenty of the DB entries are just pointers to other entries already today, for one instance it was decided that America/City and Europe/City maybe is too conflicted a namespace and we see increasingly more "the canonical name is America/State/City" or "the canonical name is Europe/Country/City".

[mikepurvis]

As a Canadian, I would love for my timezone to be Americas/Toronto or Americas/Canada/Toronto rather than America/Toronto, but that's pretty far down my register of first world problems.

[mjevans]

How about something like:

Sol3/CA/Toronto

I'd also like all 50 state capitols (and possibly also their largest city) to exist as E.G.

Sol3/US/WA-Olympia and Sol3/US/WA-Seattle (respectively to the above; I don't know Canadian provinces that well)

Sol3 is a prefix for the 3rd planet (starting ordinal 1, but anything in the orbit of Sol can be Sol0) in our solar system. It's also nicely short so easy to type out in command lines.

Every state _should_ have it's own TZ file, even if it's just an alias. That's a good forward compatible way of allowing the same config to work if future legislative efforts produce or remove timezones. It would also allow E.G. Arizona's non DST timezone to remain correctly configured in some future where the US finally ends the nightmare of DST forever.

[mikepurvis]

Including the state would be odd for the exact reason you demonstrate; a lot of people outside the country don’t know or care, especially with capital cities — who knows what region Ottawa or Canberra are in?

Country largely just makes sense to disambiguate cases like the two different cities a few hundred km apart both named Vancouver.

[mjevans]

For US cities it would make sense, though the very largest could be argued to also not include that.

Use case: Configure device for customer in another state, OK like the mailing address state 2 letter code is XX what city? Oh there's a choice of two. The one I've heard of is probably the biggest city. Either way, it comes out OK.

What if you don't know what state something is in? Sol3/US/*City should shell expand on command lines.

[AdhemarVandamme]

The prefered canonical name is continent-or-ocean/city-or-small-island because continents and cities are more stable than countries and country names. The America/state/city convention is the exception, not the rule.

Some timezone identifiers have changed, e.g. Asia/Calcutta to Asia/Kolkata in 2008 and Europe/Kiev to Europe/Kyiv in 2022. But the TZ DB maintainers are rather reluctant to make such changes, and require “long-time widespread use of the new city name” in English before deciding so.

The naming conventions for timezone identifiers are written out at https://ftp.iana.org/tz/tzdb-2022b/theory.html#naming