[PATCH] Remove locale timezone information

[Joseph Myers]

On Wed, 5 Aug 2015, Keld Simonsen wrote:

> I don't know. I think I could add timezone info since the epoch based on
> the Olson data for each of the locales. Would you be positive about committing such changes 
> Mike?  I would then have to write up a program for that.

We should not duplicate the work done externally in tracking timezone 
changes, nor embed copies of such frequently changing data in glibc (the 
existing copies of timezone data are purely for use as test inputs for zic 
and time-related functions, not for installation).

I don't think it's useful to embed Olson timezone names in glibc locales 
either.  Rather, location-selection mechanisms maintained entirely outside 
glibc should provide user-friendly ways of choosing both (language, 
country) locale rules and timezone (the latter might change when 
travelling, the former probably not).

Olson timezone names are explicitly not intended to be presented directly 
to users for timezone selection.  See the Theory file 
<https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/master/Theory>.  If a distribution is 
presenting such names (and thus causing issues because the named city is 
politically inappropriate), report it as a bug directly to that 
distribution.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com