Re: Timezone List

On 2006-09-17, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> "Magnus Hagander" <mha(at)sollentuna(dot)net> writes:
>>> Any view over the full timezone names should also include the
>>> corresponding data from zone.tab in the timezone library source.
>
>> Just noticed this mail, so that's not included in my patch.
>
> BTW, now that the view is in, I can't help noticing that it shows 550
> different zone names, while there are only 392 entries in the zone.tab
> file. I conclude that the zic people don't take maintenance of zone.tab
> very seriously, and hence that we probably shouldn't rely on it.

You're jumping to conclusions there.

Eliminating the alias names (i.e. anything not in the form Continent/*),
we get only 45 differences, of which 40 are backward-compatibility aliases
(see the "backward" source file). The remaining five are:

Asia/Riyadh87
Asia/Riyadh88
Asia/Riyadh89 (the three Riyadh?? zones are local solar time for specific
years)
Asia/Istanbul (alias for Europe/Istanbul)
Europe/Nicosia (alias for Asia/Nicosia)

So the list in zone.tab _is_ complete, it just doesn't list aliases (which
it isn't supposed to). The reason to include zone.tab in with the data
(unlike the current setup which doesn't bother to even install the file
anywhere) is to provide an answer to the question "what timezone(s) are
applicable to a specific country". For that purpose aliases are irrelevent.

--
Andrew, Supernews
http://www.supernews.com - individual and corporate NNTP services