← Back to context

Comment by ggm

4 days ago

Is there a problem with ISO3166 denoted information in general or is there a specific US issue here? I would think ISO code denoted tzdata was a public good in some sense.

20 comments

ggm

Reply
mananaysiempre  4 days ago

This has nothing to do with ISO 3166 at all. The tzdata database is the work of a single person, Arthur Olson, not a committee (or rather it was, from its birth in the 1980s until 2011 when a company decided to sue him for no reason).

And for most of its life it’s been an explicit policy that timezones are named by continent and representative population center, not by country, to avoid entangling it in territorial disputes and improve naming stability for historical data. The US/* (and Canada/*, etc.) names are deprecated and have been since 1995 (?), but apparently people were still using them because the deprecation wasn’t really apparent unless one was especially into reading release notes.

masklinn  4 days ago

All the legacy time zones were moved out of the default zoneinfo install. It’s not a us-specific issue but the legacy US/ timezones remain in widespread use, and they stop working on Debian 13 ootb (possibly Ubuntu noble as well?).

  • pixelesque  4 days ago

    Does anyone know why they are still in widespread use?

    Config defaults somewhere still using them? Man page examples? Tutorials using them? Or just force of habit?

    • zahlman  4 days ago

      > Does anyone know why they are still in widespread use?

      Because of a lack of things compelling people to change them until it causes a breakage. And then when it does cause a breakage, most people would rather move heaven and earth to complain, research workarounds, etc. rather than just change it. (Institutional structures can also make "just" changing it far harder than that should be.)

    • acdha  4 days ago

      There’s definitely inertia but I think it’s also that the US/ names match official usage: nobody, not even residents, says the time zone is New York because the official name is Eastern time.

      2 replies →

    • rtpg  4 days ago

      Some of this is surely just muscle memory or intertia as well. I remember random config values from when I was trying out linux boxes back in high school that I replicated into files that just don't get touched for decades afterwards.

      When was the last time you rebuilt your company's postgres config from scratch?

      3 replies →

    • fredoralive  4 days ago

      I suspect some of it will be because the legacy form is a bit more intuitive than the standard form. You don’t really use continents and cities as a reference to time zones normally, countries and local subdivisions makes more sense, but as other people note, it brings up POLITICS.

      3 replies →

    • Macha  4 days ago

      I wonder how much of an influence it is that US/Eastern is easier to type than America/New_York