3 ms·

How about "The city in the zone that the most people in the world could point to on a globe"?

makeitdouble 5y ago
My chaotic side would love yearly elections or competition to decide which town will be the winner for each timezones every year. Bonus points if it's an online poll where the game becomes hacking as much votes as possible without getting caught.
izacus 5y ago
Forcing the whole globe to choose the same city is pretty much opposite of equity and fairness - people from e.g. Africa, South America will know of different cities than people from North America or Northen Europe so I don't quite understand why you'd all force them into the same crutch. Computers are supposed to make lives easier for people and since we can somehow bring ads to everyone in the world, we can probably also extend timezone databases to include most of the world.
- lifthrasiir 5y ago
  Replace "equity and fairness" with "consistency" then it makes much more sense. I think Paul Eggert keeps using those words mainly because the patch was originally triggered by external complaints, but "consistency" better explains the gist of the situation. There are two ways to make the tzdb more consistent: either merging time zones that are alike since 1970, or splitting time zones as much as possible. The latter was the pre-2014 approach and much harder to maintain (after all, should we split time zones just for newly discovered pre-1970 time zone differences?), so the tzdb has gradually switched to the former for a decade. This patch is just a continuation of this ongoing switch. Alternatively, it might be possible to keep the latter approach but limit the scope so that the maintenance remains doable. For example the tzdb can forgo textual time zone identifiers and declare that downstream projects are responsible for the mapping to the external world (and thus politics). However that would make the tzdb much less useful. The current policy does seem to maximize the value of the database without much trouble (that is, limited to a minor drama) and any change to the policy requires a serious consideration about that. In comparison the forking proposal by Colebourne is at best naive.

My chaotic side would love yearly elections or competition to decide which town will be the winner for each timezones every year. Bonus points if it's an online poll where the game becomes hacking as much votes as possible without getting caught.

izacus 5y ago

Forcing the whole globe to choose the same city is pretty much opposite of equity and fairness - people from e.g. Africa, South America will know of different cities than people from North America or Northen Europe so I don't quite understand why you'd all force them into the same crutch. Computers are supposed to make lives easier for people and since we can somehow bring ads to everyone in the world, we can probably also extend timezone databases to include most of the world.

lifthrasiir 5y ago
Replace "equity and fairness" with "consistency" then it makes much more sense. I think Paul Eggert keeps using those words mainly because the patch was originally triggered by external complaints, but "consistency" better explains the gist of the situation. There are two ways to make the tzdb more consistent: either merging time zones that are alike since 1970, or splitting time zones as much as possible. The latter was the pre-2014 approach and much harder to maintain (after all, should we split time zones just for newly discovered pre-1970 time zone differences?), so the tzdb has gradually switched to the former for a decade. This patch is just a continuation of this ongoing switch. Alternatively, it might be possible to keep the latter approach but limit the scope so that the maintenance remains doable. For example the tzdb can forgo textual time zone identifiers and declare that downstream projects are responsible for the mapping to the external world (and thus politics). However that would make the tzdb much less useful. The current policy does seem to maximize the value of the database without much trouble (that is, limited to a minor drama) and any change to the policy requires a serious consideration about that. In comparison the forking proposal by Colebourne is at best naive.