On Sat, Aug 18, 2012 at 12:00:33AM -0400, Ted Byers wrote: > The most obvious reason is that there are a great many more cities in this > world than are named in the basic timezone. Such a service is essential if > you want to support determination of the proper timezone from, e.g., a > mailing address. Given that is seems so obvious to me, it is a wonder that > someone hasn't alreay written a package that bridges the gap between > geo-coding and the timezone database; but maybe one wouldn't be too hard > built on something like the geonames database.
I would certainly find it useful for there to be a module that, say, answered the question "what is the timezone in city X", with support for all cities in the world of population over, say, half a million people, and potentially added (dynamic?) aliases to the canonical timezone. (After all, my timezone, UTC-0800 (winter), UTC-0700 (summer) has many representations in the olson db which (as far as I know) are currently identical - America/Vancouver, America/Whitehorse, America/Dawson, America/Tijuana, and America/Los_Angeles.)
