Which I would find "cute" if the database contained an equal amount of reason. I am perennially irritated that "US/Pacific" which is an _official_ name of a time zone _as used_ by the relevant time keeping authority, is called "backwards."
I still think we should move away from a tz database, a 1970s idea, and move to a .timezone TLD with tzinfo stored in TXT records. Give each country it's own NS in the TLD and give them the authority to update it. If you still want a "full file" then do a zone transfer. Plus, we could also use punycode, and easily have fully internationalized time zone names, something we currently lack.
I genuinely dislike the structure and nature of the tz database.
Having it be managed by governments would mean that the whim of a politician could break things by changing the established name... say from "US/Pacific" to "USA/Pacific" or deciding by fiat to change the timezone for a political enclave within another one that doesn't have a TLD. ( https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/main/northamerica#L821 )
This also describes the compromises in the design of the system to accurately record the time.
# From Paul Eggert (2026-03-07):
# The law says that 21 hours after the usual 2026-03-08 02:00 switch from
# PST to PDT, the next day inaugurates the new standard time Pacific Time,
# i.e., just one clock change but two name changes separated by 21 hours.
# PT, the obvious abbreviation for Pacific Time, is one letter too short
# to conform to TZDB’s (and POSIX’s) [-+[:alnum:]]{3,6} requirements.
# I asked the BC government for advice, with no response. For now, do this:
# 1. As a temporary hack, pretend that the BC law takes effect
# not on 2026-03-09 at 00:00, but on 2026-11-01 at 02:00.
# This pretense works around a limitation in CLDR v48.1 (2026-01-08),
# which would otherwise say the interval uses “Pacific Standard Time”.
# (Below, this temporary hack is marked “Temporary hack; see above.”)
# Strictly speaking this hack is incorrect since the interval uses
# standard time, but it does have the right UT offset and it
# works around the CLDR limitation. We should be able to remove
# the temporary hack after CLDR is fixed.This assumes that every point on earth has exactly 1 governing body and that a significant majority of the people agree on who that governing body is and that the governing body gives a rats ass about what time it is. Or that everyone in a region agrees on what time it is. Or that ccTLDs are sufficient to unambiguously cover the entire earths surface.
The time zone database isnt just a record of "official" decisions regarding time, it is a record of what time a population thinks it is. There are geographic overlaps, cultural overlaps, pants on head stupid overlaps. It exists to try and translate between somebody somewhere some when giving a time and date reference to any point in history to whatever time system the user may choose to believe in.
Your solution is insufficiently complex to solve a problem of this complexity.
https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...