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themafia • today at 12:05 AM • 3 replies • view on HN

> the Time Zone Database also contains a surprising amount of whimsy.

Which I would find "cute" if the database contained an equal amount of reason. I am perennially irritated that "US/Pacific" which is an _official_ name of a time zone _as used_ by the relevant time keeping authority, is called "backwards."

I still think we should move away from a tz database, a 1970s idea, and move to a .timezone TLD with tzinfo stored in TXT records. Give each country it's own NS in the TLD and give them the authority to update it. If you still want a "full file" then do a zone transfer. Plus, we could also use punycode, and easily have fully internationalized time zone names, something we currently lack.

I genuinely dislike the structure and nature of the tz database.

Replies

shagie • today at 1:06 AM

That would provide the machine readable version... but not the human documentation of time. You wouldn't be able to debug the Moroccan Ramadan rule (which is provided as some elisp code) and its predictions for future changes.

Having it be managed by governments would mean that the whim of a politician could break things by changing the established name... say from "US/Pacific" to "USA/Pacific" or deciding by fiat to change the timezone for a political enclave within another one that doesn't have a TLD. ( https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/main/northamerica#L821 )

This also describes the compromises in the design of the system to accurately record the time.

    # From Paul Eggert (2026-03-07):
    # The law says that 21 hours after the usual 2026-03-08 02:00 switch from
    # PST to PDT, the next day inaugurates the new standard time Pacific Time,
    # i.e., just one clock change but two name changes separated by 21 hours.
    # PT, the obvious abbreviation for Pacific Time, is one letter too short
    # to conform to TZDB’s (and POSIX’s) [-+[:alnum:]]{3,6} requirements.
    # I asked the BC government for advice, with no response. For now, do this:
    #   1. As a temporary hack, pretend that the BC law takes effect
    # not on 2026-03-09 at 00:00, but on 2026-11-01 at 02:00.
    # This pretense works around a limitation in CLDR v48.1 (2026-01-08),
    # which would otherwise say the interval uses “Pacific Standard Time”.
    # (Below, this temporary hack is marked “Temporary hack; see above.”)
    # Strictly speaking this hack is incorrect since the interval uses
    # standard time, but it does have the right UT offset and it
    # works around the CLDR limitation.  We should be able to remove
    # the temporary hack after CLDR is fixed.
rendaw • today at 1:24 AM

You need historic timezone information to interpret past dates, not just the current timezones.

MadnessASAP • today at 12:47 AM

> Which I would find "cute" if the database contained an equal amount of reason. I am perennially irritated that "US/Pacific" which is an _official_ name of a time zone _as used_ by the relevant time keeping authority, is called "backwards."

This assumes that every point on earth has exactly 1 governing body and that a significant majority of the people agree on who that governing body is and that the governing body gives a rats ass about what time it is. Or that everyone in a region agrees on what time it is. Or that ccTLDs are sufficient to unambiguously cover the entire earths surface.

The time zone database isnt just a record of "official" decisions regarding time, it is a record of what time a population thinks it is. There are geographic overlaps, cultural overlaps, pants on head stupid overlaps. It exists to try and translate between somebody somewhere some when giving a time and date reference to any point in history to whatever time system the user may choose to believe in.

Your solution is insufficiently complex to solve a problem of this complexity.

https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...