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List:       perl-datetime
Subject:    Re: Re: Olson <-> Microsoft mappings
From:       "Michael Fair" <michael () daclubhouse ! net>
Date:       2003-09-24 19:01:15
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> On Wed, Sep 24, 2003 at 10:54:04AM -0500, Dave Rolsky said:
> > You do realize that mapping time zones to countries will take a _lot_ of
> > maintenance, right?
>
> Just as a FWIW ...
>
>
http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/raymondc/PermaLink.aspx/8b23d26b-7e11-425d-b612-13396ef3ec71

It's good to keep this kind of thing in mind.

Wouldn't the major city names be less prone to these kinds of disputes?
Surely there will be times when some will be disputed but I don't see
it happening so often as to be a major problem.

One way of handling this might be just to play no favorites and to place
cities in whatever catagories (countries) we think people are going
to look.

So in the case of places like Taiwan and Hong Kong we list them both
as part of China and as their own individual coutries.

We might include a disclaimer that the catagories are designed to put
cities where a large number of people are bound to look and that this
should not be construed as a geography lesson.

We could list all three of Great Britain and England and Ireland as
countries.

We should also keep in mind that every mapping will be tied to a particular
version of the Olson DB.  That version will have a timestamp which can help
settle any disputes (it doesn't remove them entirely but avoids disputes
brought up after the timestamp).

Lastly, I'm for some reason or another not worried if people like the
government of India want to ban the use of the DateTime module...
It's Open Source, let them distribute their own modified version.
Any graphical UIs (like the RH one) will learn to just use a map without
borders.  Putting the cities at the proper lat/long is the important thing.

In the not-so-distant future I see there will be a need to be able to
localize
these mappings.  I see no reason that the mappings need to match from one
locale
to the next.  If some country wants to provide their own local world view
I see no reason it can't be released right alongside the others.
While I didn't imagine it used for this purpose, this is another example
where allowing people to publish modules that others can just "plugin" to
get different mappings becomes useful.

My $0.02 worth,
-- Michael --

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