On Thu, 15 Jan 2026 at 00:57, Tim Parenti via tz <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Wed, 14 Jan 2026 at 19:02, Paul Menzel via tz <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> I looked for *Doha*, but didn’t find it in GNOME [1]. >> Looking through the Time Zone Database archive, there is in `asia` [3]: >> >> # Bahrain >> # Qatar >> # Zone NAME STDOFF RULES FORMAT [UNTIL] >> Zone Asia/Qatar 3:26:08 - LMT 1920 # Al Dawhah >> / Doha >> 4:00 - %z 1972 Jun >> 3:00 - %z > > > The zone ID for Doha is indeed named Asia/Qatar, as you found. There are > other places named Doha in Asia, so the name "Qatar" was chosen to avoid > ambiguity. > > This principle is applied in a few other places as well — for example, > America/Puerto_Rico instead of "San Juan" and America/Miquelon instead of "St > Pierre". > >> is there another way to make it easier for people to find the right time >> zone entry? > > > In general, we continue to recommend that end-users use a tool like our > tzselect or something similar packaged in their operating system to help find > the proper zone ID, rather than perusing through tzdata source code directly.
See https://data.iana.org/time-zones/theory.html#naming GNOME should be mapping the time zone names to user-friendly names. Unfortunately, most UIs fail to do this and only expose the names from the underlying raw data set.
