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TZDB would be a great case study in open source. It has lots of issues. IMHO the main issue is that 99.99% of its users only become aware of it through settin

TZDB would be a great case study in open source. It has lots of issues. IMHO the main issue is that 99.99% of its users only become aware of it through setting timezones. It is not designed for setting timezones, and the user experience is frankly terrible, the identifiers are unsuitable, and there is no standard way to present them to non-technical end users. The maintainers have their head in the sand about its use claiming that they don't provide the 'useful name of timezone' service or the 'useful subset of modern timezones people actually use' service. Instead, they only provide the 'festidious historic list of timezones as researched from sources verging on obscurity' service ("just making sure that the data is correct"). It seems that a large portion of the email list is fixated on that service ("people who know about time and (perhaps) care about little else..." as summarized by one member) and apparently consider the partial shift of some data elsewhere to be sacrilege. Recently it seems the maintainer has had a different idea. The whole project should probably be reconsidered from scratch by a well meaning body, however it's a thankless task and nobody is going to do a technically solid and apolitical job for free... hence status-quagmire-quo. Popular time is inherently a political beast and a human problem.

stubish 5y ago
The localized 'useful name of timezone' is part of the Unicode CLDR, which lets you map to the IANA and Windows timezone identifiers. Avoiding scope creep is a good thing, especially when there are other groups better positioned to do the work.
- contingencies 5y ago
  I agree about scope, but they've already thrown that out the window by including biggest-'city'-in-the-zone approximations and other such cruft. However, all fundamental use cases require naming. Therefore, it makes sense to have in scope. I dare say if this project were reconsidered today, it would be very different in form and would have at a minimum a clear scope definition and half the stuff there would be elsewhere.

stubish 5y ago

The localized 'useful name of timezone' is part of the Unicode CLDR, which lets you map to the IANA and Windows timezone identifiers. Avoiding scope creep is a good thing, especially when there are other groups better positioned to do the work.

contingencies 5y ago
I agree about scope, but they've already thrown that out the window by including biggest-'city'-in-the-zone approximations and other such cruft. However, all fundamental use cases require naming. Therefore, it makes sense to have in scope. I dare say if this project were reconsidered today, it would be very different in form and would have at a minimum a clear scope definition and half the stuff there would be elsewhere.