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Admin
So, Crédit Agricole? BNP Paribas? LCL?
Admin
Any WTF about time zones must be acknowledged as suffering from the fact that time zones are truly not understandable in their full glory by the average developer. Take pity on them while you burn their code and start over.
Admin
My understanding of TZDB is that while it is maintained by committee now, before late 2011 it was mostly maintained by one guy - Paul Eggert. He originally came up with those naming conventions shown here back in 1993.
Admin
I once bought something on ebay, coming from somewhere in California. UPS tracking showed 4 updates with increasing dates as it moved eastward (lived in MA at the time). Except. One location halfway there showed a location in Texas 5 years earlier. To the TARDIS, Robin!
Admin
As for the TZDB, I've been a contributor since it was hosted at HHS. TRWTF is that time zones are created by people. TRWTF with the example provided is that the TZDB identifiers are not meant for human consumption; we strongly recommend that implementors choose the subset of zones that make sense for them and present them with friendlier names.
FWIW, we need to keep all the time zones that have existed during the Unix epoch going back to 1970 so that displayed time is correct. Since 1970, Indiana has shifted its time zone boundaries a few times and gone back and forth on Daylight Saving Time, which is why Indiana has such a cluster of zones.
Admin
Indeed, here's St. Paul's epistle about naming:
https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/1993-October/009233.html
Admin
Whoever submitted that list of timezones at the end as never set up a Linux box from scratch. The Debian installer always shows that list. It's quite recognizable.
Admin
Funny you should say that because I hadn't installed or used Linux for over 10 years until about a month ago and if any of the installs I've done since showed me that list, I didn't notice it. I can say for sure that the one I did yesterday just defaulted to my timezone so I didn't even look at the list. I've only worked with relatively downstream distros, not sure if that makes a difference.
Thanks to everyone for the context and tidbits.
Admin
Well, I thought smugly, America and the USA in particular is totally WTF about time zones unlike here in the UK. So I decided to look up the list on my Mac and I found it asked me to select the nearest city, of which it had many in the UK alone. The UK has only one time zone (two counting BST/WET+1) and yet there are many cities in the UK to choose from. Not only that, but the database lists both London and Islington, which is now no more than a suburb in London.
Not only that, but the "nearest city" question might be problematic in parts of Western Spain where the nearest city might be in Portugal which is in WET but Spain is in CET.
Admin
As Ross_Presser's link explains: "The advantage of going to the detail of CITY is that we can use local mean time for times before standard time was introduced (e.g. before 1914 Jan 1 in Albania); this increases the accuracy of the database."
The UK has only one time zone now, but places such as London, Oxford and Bristol all had different time standards until Brunel came along, so presumably the list captures that (or allows it to be captured).