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Debian 13, Postgres, and the US/* time zones

(rachelbythebay.com)
283 points move-on-by | 2 comments | 12 Sep 25 02:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.455s | source
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ggm ◴[12 Sep 25 02:48 UTC] No.45218201[source]▶
Is there a problem with ISO3166 denoted information in general or is there a specific US issue here? I would think ISO code denoted tzdata was a public good in some sense.
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1. mananaysiempre ◴[12 Sep 25 07:25 UTC] No.45219576[source]▶
This has nothing to do with ISO 3166 at all. The tzdata database is the work of a single person, Arthur Olson, not a committee (or rather it was, from its birth in the 1980s until 2011 when a company decided to sue him for no reason).

And for most of its life it’s been an explicit policy that timezones are named by continent and representative population center, not by country, to avoid entangling it in territorial disputes and improve naming stability for historical data. The US/* (and Canada/*, etc.) names are deprecated and have been since 1995 (?), but apparently people were still using them because the deprecation wasn’t really apparent unless one was especially into reading release notes.

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2. breakingcups ◴[12 Sep 25 07:54 UTC] No.45219793[source]▶
Interesting, I hadn't heard about that frivolous lawsuit before: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-wins-protection-time-...