A fork for the time-zone database?

Posted Sep 30, 2021 9:14 UTC (Thu) by aurel32 (subscriber, #7059)
Parent article: A fork for the time-zone database?

In my opinion, the biggest issue with merging zones whose timestamps agree since 1970 is no the lost of the history, but the fact that the backward links that are provided instead do not provide all the information. Before this process started, it was possible to get the list of zones per inhabited ISO-3166 country. This is not possible anymore.

Upstream and a few supporters on the mailing list have a very US-centric view there, the fact that there is not one timezone per US state is used as an argument to say that there is no need for one timezone per ISO-3166 country.

A fork for the time-zone database?

Posted Sep 30, 2021 9:31 UTC (Thu) by aurel32 (subscriber, #7059) [Link]

Some mails showing that:
http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-September/030464.html
http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-September/030469.html
http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-September/030470.html

A fork for the time-zone database?

Posted Sep 30, 2021 12:34 UTC (Thu) by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039) [Link]

This is not a uniquely American phenomenon, for what it's worth. Six of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada have two time zones. Sakha in Russia also has three, and the state of Amazonas in Brazil has two. There are probably others I don't know off the top of my head.

Americans tend to be the focus of attention, but it happens in multiple federal countries.

A fork for the time-zone database?

Posted Sep 30, 2021 18:07 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

The distance from Los Angeles to New York City is much greater* than the distance from Paris to Moscow. The land area of Texas is similar to the land area of France. The population of California is a bit smaller than the population of Spain. In geographic and demographic terms, US states are at least somewhat comparable to European countries.

* Google gives deceptively similar numbers for me, but then I realized that one is in miles and the other is in kilometers.