21

The history of timezones has some existing cases where a specific timezone has been renamed. For example, the Asia/Calcutta timezone has been deemed obsolete and replaced by Asia/Kolkata.

In Ukraine, according to international standards, there is a timezone called Europe/Kiev. The capital of Ukraine is officially called "Kyiv". "Kiev" is an incorrect version that emerged a long time way before a Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

We have a really large community of programmers, that would like to start the process of renaming the Europe/Kiev timezone to Europe/Kyiv. We understand that it will take a long time for everybody to transition, but it has to be done in the long term.

Where and how do we put this suggestion so it can be reviewed by the people who officially rule timezone names?

Ole V.V.
  • 81,772
  • 15
  • 137
  • 161
Oleksandr Leskiv
  • 539
  • 5
  • 10
  • 1
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database#Maintenance -> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6557 – jonrsharpe Apr 11 '22 at 14:33
  • 2
    This question is obviously driven by political reasons. The identifier Europe/Kiev has nothing to do with Ukrainian or Russian language (see also usage of latin script) but with the usual standards of English language up to now. And it has never been intended to be used in public UI as representation to users as the tzdb maintainers say. You should instead show your users the appropriate Ukrainian expression resp. translation of technical identifiers in UI-layer, and your problem vanishes. It is not worth to create artificial problems where there are not in public UIs. – Meno Hochschild Apr 11 '22 at 14:43
  • 1
    @jonrsharpe The tzdb maintainers have already been confrontated with this renaming wish some years ago, see also this newer [post](https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2022-March/031275.html). Maybe they will change soon due to actual political pressure to use more Ukrainian-sounding words in English, but `Europe/Kiev` will certainly be continued as least as link for compatibility reasons. Anyway, I am not a friend of renaming technical identifiers. And SO should not be misused for political campaigns but for real developer problems. – Meno Hochschild Apr 11 '22 at 15:12
  • I’m voting to close this question because it is not about programming problems but driven by politics and therefore out of scope of SO. – Meno Hochschild Apr 11 '22 at 15:14
  • 6
    How can a mistake that was made by someone who didn't know how to correctly spell Europian country capital in English is considered politics. The question is obviously not about a UI problem or that people can't map a "techincal identifier" to another string on a website. – Oleksandr Leskiv Apr 11 '22 at 15:30
  • 2
    The question is technically about who is responsible for determining which of those "technical identifiers" are valid and should be used in libraries. – Oleksandr Leskiv Apr 11 '22 at 15:32
  • 1
    https://www.iana.org/time-zones – Howard Hinnant Apr 11 '22 at 15:56
  • 1
    Your issue has been discussed many times by many Ukrainians on tzdb mailing list, for years, so you don't need to repeat it, an example was given by me as link in a previous comment. And about pronounciation of name of Kiev/Kyiv in English, this is just quite usual that English speakers pronounciate non-English names very different. Even in other languages, you will find big differences. For example: Vienna versus Wien in Austria, or Stockholm versus Tukholma or Milano versus Mailand or Milan. The list is endless. Not worth to fight for "correct spelling" of technical identifiers. – Meno Hochschild Apr 11 '22 at 18:41
  • 2
    imho the question is still unsuited for stackoverflow as it's not about an actual programming question... – FObersteiner Apr 11 '22 at 18:41
  • 2
    If I have understood correctly IANA’s policy is to use English language city names where they exist. My own time zone is Europe/Copenhagen, not Europa/København (nor Europa/Koebenhavn nor Europe/Kobenhavn), and please let it stay that way. If along the way *Kyiv* becomes the predominantly used spelling in English, I should say that you will have a case for introducing a new time zone ID along with the existing one. Just my opinion, nothing that will count anywhere. – Ole V.V. Apr 12 '22 at 14:46
  • 11
    The primary IANA TZ Coordinator has accepted Oleksandr Leskiv's request. It will still be a matter of months before this change propagates out, but it is happening. Good job Oleksandr Leskiv! – Howard Hinnant Apr 13 '22 at 12:00
  • Thank you so much for breaking bunch of apps working with different APIs that aren't updated at the same time... One example: https://github.com/phw198/OutlookGoogleCalendarSync/issues/1525 Wiki and other resources still have it both ways to write it in English, either Kiev or Kyiv. Some changes have much more impact than initially estimated. – Kris Avi Aug 17 '22 at 15:47
  • @OleksandrLeskiv This has been certainly politically motivated and change in technical identifiers without leaving backwards compatibility like Meno Hochschild spoke about. Now that the change has propagated, it is showing few systems breaking since propagation is not done at the same speed. Are you there to make bug reports to every system not caught up with changes? Now it has become programming issue for SO. It was a bad change done from political reasons. In some languages Kiev is more similar to their language versions so this will just problems in systems. – Kris Avi Aug 17 '22 at 16:11
  • 4
    FYI, the `Europe/Kyiv` spelling was added in TZDB version 2022b. [Announcement here](http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz-announce/2022-August/000071.html). – Matt Johnson-Pint Sep 05 '22 at 17:29
  • @FObersteiner now this question is useful to actually understand the reason for newly appearing timezone errors. – Ruslan Sep 17 '22 at 20:25
  • 1
    @OleksandrLeskiv thank you for your effort! Rollback of the politically-motivated pressure that was here for 300+ years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification) is important for many countries listed in this Wikipedia article, and also others who were not yet erased from the world map by the empire. Software needs to reflect the state of the modern world, not the outdated status-quo. – Aldekein Jun 14 '23 at 07:33

1 Answers1

6

Time Zone Database (tzdata) is managed by Iana, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

The suggestion to rename the time zone ID Europe/Kiev to Europe/Kyiv has been made and accepted! The change was introduced in release 2022b (Released 2022-08-11).

From a software point of view, this is a breaking change that could have been managed much better with a transition period where both time zone identifiers exist and the old is deprecated.

Unfortunately, the release is now out. Softwares are starting to include the new tzdata and both IDs appear in systems creating unexpected bugs. If you manipulate time zone IDs, I would suggest people adding a condition to support both time zone IDs for a transition period that could last many months.

Laurent
  • 14,122
  • 13
  • 57
  • 89
  • Oh, that's why some software has begun emitting time zone errors (e.g. Stellarium weekly builds, which made me search for this TZ). Interestingly, while the change was supposed to please Ukrainians, it's exactly they who will suffer from incompatibilities. – Ruslan Sep 17 '22 at 20:20
  • 3
    @Ruslan Probably that is a good chance for software to fix their implementation. The backwards compatible name has been added to `https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tzdb-2022b/backward`, so well-behaving software should accept both names, and normalize to the new one. Of course, when software presents a list to the user, it will probably only contain one name (the old one if the list is hard-coded, or the new name if the list is pulled from tzdb dynamically) – mihi Oct 19 '22 at 21:16