but that'll possibly give you an incorrect time!
If you want to store "8am in Paris on the 2026-01-01", then you store "2026-01-01T08:00:00 Europe/Paris". Great, if Paris decides to change their offset rules, that's fine.
Currently, that would be `2026-01-01T08:00:00+01:00` but if Paris decide to ditch DST, it could become `2026-01-01T08:00:00+00:00`. All good, you stored a timezone rather than an offset, so you're decoupled from the timezone->offset changes.
But if tomorrow `Europe/Paris` cease to exist, and is replaced with Europe/NewNewYork? The last definition of Europe/Paris would make this date `2026-01-01T08:00:00+01:00`, but if Europe/NewNewYork ditched DST then it wouldn't be 8am for the people living there, it'd be 7am.
You're decoupled from the timezone->offset changes, but not from location->timezone changes.
See https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/main/backward for all the deprecated zones.
Hopefully the British would be kind enough to email the TZ DB group at the IANA (tz@iana.org) a couple years in advance of the legislation to change the name so that the group can get started on collecting the DST rules for Europe/NewNewYork. Some people and devices will probably stick to Europe/Paris out of habit and/or resistance to the change, so the TZ DB would probably be unlikely to remove it, but they may point references from it to Europe/NewNewYork as the new "canonical" name. Plenty of the DB entries are just pointers to other entries already today, for one instance it was decided that America/City and Europe/City maybe is too conflicted a namespace and we see increasingly more "the canonical name is America/State/City" or "the canonical name is Europe/Country/City".
Sol3/CA/Toronto
I'd also like all 50 state capitols (and possibly also their largest city) to exist as E.G.
Sol3/US/WA-Olympia and Sol3/US/WA-Seattle (respectively to the above; I don't know Canadian provinces that well)
Sol3 is a prefix for the 3rd planet (starting ordinal 1, but anything in the orbit of Sol can be Sol0) in our solar system. It's also nicely short so easy to type out in command lines.
Every state _should_ have it's own TZ file, even if it's just an alias. That's a good forward compatible way of allowing the same config to work if future legislative efforts produce or remove timezones. It would also allow E.G. Arizona's non DST timezone to remain correctly configured in some future where the US finally ends the nightmare of DST forever.
Country largely just makes sense to disambiguate cases like the two different cities a few hundred km apart both named Vancouver.
Some timezone identifiers have changed, e.g. Asia/Calcutta to Asia/Kolkata in 2008 and Europe/Kiev to Europe/Kyiv in 2022. But the TZ DB maintainers are rather reluctant to make such changes, and require “long-time widespread use of the new city name” in English before deciding so.
The naming conventions for timezone identifiers are written out at https://ftp.iana.org/tz/tzdb-2022b/theory.html#naming
https://medium.com/servicios-a0/on-solving-the-tzdb-changes-...
https://github.com/tc39/proposal-canonical-tz - appropriately to these comments, a proposal to handle tzdb changes, built on top of JS Temporal, includes some great examples of all the ways this can happen
Thanks! I was the co-champion of that proposal. Parts of it were merged into Temporal last year, and other parts are already part of the JS Internationalization (ECMA-402) specification here: https://tc39.es/ecma402/#sec-use-of-iana-time-zone-database
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database
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By the way, I looked up the time zone in Crimea.
> On 29 March 2014, after annexation by Russia, Crimea switched from Eastern European Time (UTC+02:00) to Moscow Time (UTC+04:00 then, subsequently changed to UTC+03:00). [2]
Crimea has its own zone in the IANA database, Europe/Simferopol, which was updated in 2014 (and already existed before, as it already used Moscow time from 1994 to 1997). [3]
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Ukraine
[3] https://lists.iana.org/hyperkitty/list/tz@iana.org/thread/DS...; https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/bb203f1bb0b6cd4bb2b08f25...; https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/bb203f1bb0b6cd4bb2b08f2560...
