The surprising whimsy of the Time Zone Database

themafia

> the Time Zone Database also contains a surprising amount of whimsy. Which I would find "cute" if the database contained an equal amount of reason. I am perennially irritated that "US/Pacific" which is an _official_ name of a time zone _as used_ by the relevant time keeping authority, is called "backwards." I still think we should move away from a tz database, a 1970s idea, and move to a .timezone TLD with tzinfo stored in TXT records. Give each country it's own NS in the TLD and give them the authority to update it. If you still want a "full file" then do a zone transfer. Plus, we could also use punycode, and easily have fully internationalized time zone names, something we currently lack. I genuinely dislike the structure and nature of the tz database.

dfc

If you like this there has been a interesting discussion on the tzdb mailing list about how to handle the Vancouver change and the next releases of the tzdb and the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository: https://lists.iana.org/hyperkitty/list/tz@iana.org/thread/IE...

NewJazz

Is this article finished? There are mentions of excerpts from the database, but the excerpts are not reproduced or linked to, as far as I can tell.

fzeindl

I once digged into this database out of curiosity and found incredibly detailed research on many edge cases. Like time zones in Germany being temporarily aligned to Moscow during soviet occupancy after World War Two. One particular commenter stood out to me, so I looked him up because I was interested which kind of people spend so much time correcting timezone information. Turns out he was an astrologer and wanted his astrology-program to work perfectly correct. I find it funny that we have to thank astrology for the correct calculations in our banking software :).