London is on Berlin time?

Posted Sep 30, 2021 20:34 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: London is on Berlin time? by nim-nim
Parent article: A fork for the time-zone database?

> Thus, you *can* *not* wipe out those territories to please someone’s idea of political border even if you wanted to.

This is why cities are (usually) superior to countries (except for Jerusalem, which is a whole other level of political-messed-upness).

> And then making both version of ownership exist at the same time is just a matter of aliasing as long as you’re smart enough to make all aliases point to a neutral key (for example a longitude+indice value) and not the name of someone else’s capital.

That breaks on Jerusalem just as much as calling it "Jerusalem" would. The problem is that the individual people living within the city go by different timezones depending on their nationality and the extent to which they personally recognize Israeli jurisdiction over the city. You can't lat/long your way out of that. If you try using numerical indices, then somebody has to be "first" and somebody has to be "second," and they'll argue over that instead.

London is on Berlin time?

Posted Oct 1, 2021 2:00 UTC (Fri) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (3 responses)

Any organization significant enough to be defining time zones would have its own domain name, right? That ought to be true even if the political situation is "complicated" in terms of who actually has jurisdiction over the territory. So why not just use DNS, e.g. <tz://transportation.gov/Eastern> for Eastern Time in the US (where the Department of Transportation defines the time zones)? Ideally each time zone authority would publish the data about the zones it manages at a well-known URL and the time-zone database would only need to collate the results.

London is on Berlin time?

Posted Oct 1, 2021 6:59 UTC (Fri) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (2 responses)

You cannot realistically expect a small island nation in the Pacific, whose primary economic activity is fishing, to run and maintain such a server, unless they derive some real (monetary) benefit from doing so. The same applies to many other countries throughout the world.

Also, anybody can register a domain name. You have to have a more selective set of criteria than that. If you go by "does it have a ccTLD?" then you're right back to ISO country codes, but now they're wearing a funny hat.

London is on Berlin time?

Posted Oct 1, 2021 15:32 UTC (Fri) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (1 responses)

> You cannot realistically expect a small island nation in the Pacific, whose primary economic activity is fishing, to run and maintain such a server…

If they can afford to publish rules about their time zone then they can afford a few dollars a month for a domain name and some shared hosting capacity.

> Also, anybody can register a domain name.

Sure, and that's kind of the point. There should be some notability threshold for pulling the data into the collated time-zone database, just as a spam prevention measure, but I see no reason whatsoever to impose any further limits on who can publish time-zone information. If there are real people following the time zones some organization publishes then that organization's zones should be listed.

London is on Berlin time?

Posted Oct 10, 2021 0:40 UTC (Sun) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

A lot of island nations are making bank off of selling vanity domains, so money isn't an object. The bigger problem is that they often outsource management of the ccTLD to not-quite-upstanding third parties on the other side of the world. Putting timezones into the same system isn't such a good idea in that case.

London is on Berlin time?

Posted Oct 1, 2021 8:19 UTC (Fri) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (5 responses)

Strawman.

The indice of the zone aliased to would be the same.

Because *operationally*, even if people disagree on who owns what, trains still have to leave on time, schoolchildren still have to go to school on time, so there is only one timezone in operation at any given time in a particular territory.

So the *correct* answer to cases like Taiwan is to have
China/Taiwan and Taiwan exist at the same time in the database as aliases and point to a technical neutral key like 121.some_indice

Which is *exactly* the reverse of the TSDB move.

In real life you do not resolve arguments Salomons’ way with rash decisions everyone disagrees with (moreso when you *ability* to make fictitious grouping exist is nil). You resolve arguments by giving something to every party.

Especially in IT where aliases and indirections are the norm.

London is on Berlin time?

Posted Oct 2, 2021 20:02 UTC (Sat) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (4 responses)

> Because *operationally*, even if people disagree on who owns what, trains still have to leave on time, schoolchildren still have to go to school on time, so there is only one timezone in operation at any given time in a particular territory.

This is incorrect. In Jerusalem, they *don't* agree on what the local time is (or, to be more precise, they don't agree on exactly when DST begins and ends). This *does* cause the exact disruptions you identify, and yet they disagree anyway. The same is also applicable to some of the western regions of China (because China insists on having one timezone for the whole country, despite the country being far too wide for this to make logical sense), where different communities are on different offsets and will informally indicate times as "local" or "Beijing" time (the "local" timezone doesn't officially exist, so it's not in tzdb, but people use it).

London is on Berlin time?

Posted Oct 2, 2021 22:36 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

> where different communities are on different offsets and will informally indicate times as "local" or "Beijing" time (the "local" timezone doesn't officially exist, so it's not in tzdb, but people use it).

AFAIU (based on podcast data), it actually differs based on the language being spoken (rather than being explicitly labeled as such). Speaking Chinese, time is Beijing-offset. Speaking the local language, time offsets are a more sensible offset.

London is on Berlin time?

Posted Oct 3, 2021 4:54 UTC (Sun) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

Ah, thank you for the correction. Of course, that's even *worse*, because now we're roping in the notoriously-terrible POSIX locale mechanism...

London is on Berlin time?

Posted Oct 3, 2021 8:48 UTC (Sun) by ghane (guest, #1805) [Link]

Asia/Urumqi is in the TZ database, and was added precisely because it was documented that people are using it. It UTC+6, Beijing (or Shangai) is UTC+8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time

London is on Berlin time?

Posted Oct 4, 2021 13:35 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

It is not possible to disagree on train time because two trains in the same place at the same time = lots of deaths.

People can disagree on what zone the entity that schedules trains should use to display scheduling but this entity is most definitely knows what timezone it uses for scheduling decisions.

There is a strong temptation to roundtrip between physical location, timezone and political authority. That does not work. That will never work. It’s not a one-to-one relationship.

Labeling timezones with city names (and worse, country capital names) is horrible because it assumes this one-to-one relationship.

London is on Berlin time?

Posted Oct 3, 2021 18:45 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> That breaks on Jerusalem just as much as calling it "Jerusalem" would.

Wait... if they can agree on neither the time nor _the name of the city_ then there is no problem: just use those different names and problem solved! No?