On Mar 23, 2011, at 2:15 AM, Christian PERRIER wrote:
I'm just not fond of "Australia/Sydney" presented as a choice, I'd rather have "New South-Wales".
For what it's worth, the timezone database (as evidenced by, among other things, the output of the "tzselect" command) is organized mostly in terms of country/city rather than country/larger- geographical-area.
Which is not to say that the larger geographical areas get completely short-shrift in the timezone database. Look at the directory structure under /usr/share/zoneinfo for example.
As I understand it, the choice of a large city in the affected geographic area is practical in two ways:
1) Individual cities are fairly unlikely to be split into two or more timezones. Larger geographical units are more likely to be split than individual cities -- all depending on unpredictable future political squabbles.
2) Most people know what their nearest large city is. They may not know the fine distinctions of past and present political divisions as applied to timezones as applied to their present location.
Just one point of view from somebody who occasionally lurks on the "tz" mailing list.
Enjoy! Rick