American exceptionalism time zones aren't used since the 90s. even the cpus from that time are already dropped from kernel support. heck even the text encoding is gone.
If anything, the city TZ always felt off, like I was opting in to that specific city’s strange legal decisions or something.
that is exactly what time zones are for :) not being snarky (wasn't before either, i really love that blog!). but the whole reason for tz is to join the ever changing oddities of political bodies from one very specific region.
(It doesn’t, but that’s what it implies to me.)
One important thing to understand is that the time zones of the tz database, and hence generally the time zones used in computing, are a slightly different concept than legislative time zones.
Still feels weird, though. What if LA specifically passes a time zone law so that now it’s sometimes wrong for everyone else in California. Do we add an America/Cali_except_LA zone?
That’s probably hypothetical. It seems unlikely. But what a major pain in the ass if it did happen?
Yes, it's silly and inefficient, but so are time zones. It's not an easy problem to wrangle on a computer, for reasons that are exactly as you have described.
It’s an inherently complex, ugly mess.
So the trade-off is timezones being specific to a particular city but remaining unambiguous forward and backward in time.
You can’t avoid pain when there is a change in the geographic area of a legislative time zone. But you can avoid the case of a time zone ID becoming ambiguous in terms of the UTC<—>local time mapping it’s supposed to define. The latter is the aim of the present scheme.