(if answering, please keep CC and put "X-PTS-Approved: yes" in
headers
so that tzdata@packages.debian.org gets the mail)
Quoting Clytie Siddall (clytie@riverland.net.au):
Hi guys :)
I'm in the middle of one of my running efforts to get developers to
use iso-codes as a plugin/library for their software, so they won't
have long lists of language names, country names, currency names
etc.
in their programs which we have to translate over and over again,
and
which they invariably fail to keep accurate or current.
In this case, it's Evolution (GNOME).
While paging through the huge Evolution translation file, I note
that,
in addition to a lo-o-ng list of language names, and an equally long
list of time/date data they could get from the locale, Evo lists
timezones. e.g.
#.
#.* These are the timezone names from the Olson timezone data.
#.* We only place them here so gettext picks them up for
translation.
#.* Don't include in any C files.
#.
#: ../calendar/zones.h:7
msgid "Africa/Abidjan"
msgstr "Châu Phi/Abidjan"
Any chance iso-codes will take on timezones?
Could be interesting. But not necessarily the way to go.
However, that'd require some coordination with fellow people who
(well) maintain such stuff. In Debian, the tzdata package is now well
developed and maintained, for instance.
I don't really know if timezones are normalized in some way. If they
are, it could make sense to imagine moving this to iso-codes (so that
it could benefit people outside Debian). But timezones data goes far
beyond simple names: it includes information about the shift wrt UTC
as well as Daylight Savings Time information.
If timezones aren't normalized, I think it
would maybe make more sense to keep this in a separate
package/distribution.