On Thu, August 6, 2009 7:42 am, Ted Byers wrote: > Isn't it odd that, in the Asia data, there are values for Gaza and > Jerusalem, which are only a short distance apart (in terms of how far > a crow would have to fly to travel between them, not politically), or more > odd, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore (which are separated only by a narrow > channel), and yet I don't see any data for the major Indian cities like > Mumbai, Calcutta or Delhi. If there are Indian cities > represented there, I don't know their names. And THAT strikes me as odd, > given that India, by itself, has about a quarter of the world's population > and it has some of the world's largest cities. And yet, in the american > data, there are values for Glace Bay, Goose Bay, Thunder Bay, Whitehorse. > It seems strange that what are tiny little villages > are represented while such huge cities are not.
While the zones eschew using country as part of the name (because countries change names much more often than cities do), what is logically one zone, with consistent offset and dst rules, is represented in the database by multiple zones, one per country (because the legal changes to offset/dst rules often happen by country, and otherwise what is one zone now would be two zones tomorrow much more often). Within each zone, the most "recognizable" city is used as the name. In some cases, this isn't the largest. See the comments in the region files for rationales, for instance: # IATA SSIM (1993-02/1994-09) say that the Holiday Islands (Hayman, Lindeman, # Hamilton) observed DST for two years after the rest of Queensland stopped. # Hamilton is the largest, but there is also a Hamilton in Victoria, # so use Lindeman.
