> but not the human documentation of time.

And a single database maintained by a volunteer and accountable to no one is the best way to achieve this?

> say from "US/Pacific" to "USA/Pacific"

Did the US assign itself the .us TLD? These things are already defined. A more realistic example would be the US changing the name of the "Pacific" timezone to the "Western" timezone. All users of that timezone have to incorporate that change anyways and most would probably want to.

> change the timezone for a political enclave within another one that doesn't have a TLD.

You could actually grant the entire Navajo Nation the .nsn.us.timezone subdomain. I'm sure they find it absolutely insulting to be instructed to use "America/Denver." Why is that better? We could directly grant them their own authority.

There's also a handful of countries the tzdb didn't bother with and instruct to use their neighboring countries definition. In some instances this arrangement can be rather insulting to the political history of the two countries. Why is this better?

> the compromises in the design

What compromise? Here Eggert is ostensibly trying to get a sovereign government to participate in the "TZDB's requirements" and since he can't has to invent a hack to make things appear to work. Which is completely backwards and highlights precisely why I think this whole centralized database concept for this problem is flawed.

accountable to no one

There's a good lesson here for any who wants to be a founder and start their own company - the maintainers of the timezone DB are accountable to their users, just as any founder is accountable to their customers.

If the timezone DB maintainers start messing around with the way it works, they will quickly find that people start alternatives, which would be worse for everyone. Governments would choose to own them, and the bad things other posters have talked about would happen. Particularly bad governments would pass laws that mandate the IT systems in that country would have to use their timezone data. That would be yet another way a country can exert control. The only reason they don't do it now is because it's incredibly hard work and obviously no value when there's a gold standard available for free.

If you're choosing to start a business you should remember that this is true of your customers - if you start messing with things for the fun of it rather than because it provides obvious value, those customers will go somewhere else.

> Here Eggert is ostensibly trying to get a sovereign government to participate in the "TZDB's requirements" and since he can't has to invent a hack to make things appear to work. Which is completely backwards and highlights precisely why I think this whole centralized database concept for this problem is flawed.

Eggert is petitioning the government for a redress of greivances on behalf of more or less the entire computing industry (or whatever portion follows POSIX): to whit, the world has come to agreement that timezone abbreviations must match [-+[:alnum:]]{3,6} and PT does not match that.

Now, BC government could ask every vendor of software that displays a time zone abbreviation to use PT, and then they could individually come back and say, no it needs three letters. And then they could threaten to not buy products that won't say PT and not allow imports of said products... But then the vendors would probably ask if they have control over imports or if that's a federal responsibility (I don't know) and that they're not doing a one off to fix something for BC. But if that's how it's going to be, probably maybe come back with POs in 5 years when POSIX standards have filtered down to allow two character abbreviations. Seems easier to get told it's a problem in one place and hopefully figure out what the answer is once.