"Where are you?" SAIGON should be named "Ho Chi Minh City"

I'll contact upstream about this issue. Upstream apparently knows about it, the asia file has:

# Saigon's official name is Thanh-Pho Ho Chi Minh, but it's too long.
# We'll stick with the traditional name for now.

But maybe it's time to change it for good. Thanks for the hint with Hanoi, that's indeed much more appropriate.

It's true than maybe Than-Pho Ho Chi Minh can be a little bit long, in vietnamese Than-Pho means City. Usually even in official papers they use to reduce to TP Ho Chi Minh. Or even to TP HCM, In english we reduce to HCMC. I recommend the option TP Ho Chi Minh. Also don't forget about including the capital. Hanoi.
Thks.

Hello Arthur and tzdata team,

we just got this tzdata bug in Ubuntu:

  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tzdata/+bug/121540

which points out that "Saigon" has been renamed to "Ho Chi Minh" a
long time ago. The comment in the asia file already mentions that:

  # Saigon's official name is Thanh-Pho Ho Chi Minh, but it's too long.
  # We'll stick with the traditional name for now.

A nice solution to avoid obsolete names, retain a short name, and even
get more consistent is to use "Hanoi", which is the actual capital of
Vietnam (and is the very same TZ). Then Saigon could just be an
alias (i. e. transitional symlink) to Hanoi.

What do you think about that?

Thank you in advance,

Martin
--
Martin Pitt http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer http://www.ubuntu.com
Debian Developer http://www.debian.org

Answers from upstream so far:

 "As was largely hashed out over China, changing to Hanoi would in fact *not* be consistent--the standard is largest
city, not necessarily capital. (For example, Australia, Canada, China, India, New Zealand, South Africa, and the USA
do not have explicit listings for their capital cities.) I argued that Beijing should be in because of its
significance in determining Chinese-calendar dates, but lost that one. As for what to call any given city, on that I
have no opinion."

Let's see whether anyone else replies.

OK, let's use "TP Ho Chi Minh".

Hello Martin, I thought from your last comment that you guys accepted to change the city name into "TP Ho Chi Minh" , but I still see the Saigon references in Hardy tzdata package here http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/all/tzdata/filelist

Have you guys forgot?

Best Regards.

Hello guys, i'm a Vietnamese Linux user, i think we must change the name of Saigon, that name was the past and remind us some bad memories.
So, can you guys change it to Ho Chi Minh city, or maybe just HCMC (in the short way) ^^!
And the truth is Ha Noi is our capital and have the same TZ with HCMC ^^! and one thing is that VN is now more and more pay attention to Linux and open source software, but we don't have enough knowlegde about this Linux... and maybe.... it's not so useful... so, you guys have any ideas to make the fast spread of Ubuntu??? like changing Saigon to HCMC?? cause that will show the goverment how many cares you guys put on our country.... and it will make the gov happy to use Linux in the gov sys ^^!
 Hope you guys can do something.... Good luck and have a nice day....

                                     Vietnamese User

i'd like to vote for Saigon to be renamed too. Alternatives may be on of "Ho Chi Minh City", "Ho Chi Minh", "TP Ho Chi Minh", "HCMC", or "Ha Noi", "Hanoi". In fact, Windows (at least Vista Business edition that i'm using here) already uses "Bankok, Hanoi, Jakarta".

Hanoi is the best one.

Hi,

If only one entry for Vietnam is allowed, I would choose "Hanoi" as it makes more sense.

Hanoi is being the Capital and it maybe not the largest city of the country but, at least it is the second largest city of the country.
BTW Hanoi has plans to expand to three neighbour provinces (Ha Tay, Hoa Binh and Phu Tho) which then will make of Hanoi the largest urban agglomeration of Vietnam. Also the term of "largest" as criteria is not really a good one, as ranking can never be fixed for eternal. Several criteria should better be used to have the "Most meaningful" choice wheen it has to be unique.

If Saigon is to be kept, it should definitely be renamed to "TP Ho Chi Minh" or to "TP HoChiMinh" if the number of characters is an issue. In this case Hanoi is even one character shorter than Saigon.

Ha Noi is the Capital of the country and there's only one time zone in Viet Nam. There's no reason to keep Sai Gon

Clearly the Capital of a country should be listed like for any other country whether it has the largest population or not. The argument of population is only valid for other cities being listed in case of countries with more than one time zone. As regards the spelling one could argue whether it should be the spelling in Vietnamese language "Ha Noi" or the spelling in English language "Hanoi". For the English language interface I would suggest that "Hanoi" is more appropriate.

Hello tzdata developers,

I already contacted you about this a little while ago, but the
discussion didn't get very far.

In https://launchpad.net/bugs/121540, Vientamese users make quite a
clear statement that "Saigon" is obsolete and, more importantly,
politically sensitive.

The current name of that city has been "Ho Chi Minh" for very long, so
it should be renamed to "TP Ho Chi Minh", and Saigon should get a
transitional link.

Last time it was already proposed to use the capital "Hanoi" instead
or in addition, but I understand that you usually use the largest
city, not capitals. I take it that didn't change?

Thanks for considering,

Martin

--
Martin Pitt | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com) | Debian Developer (www.debian.org)

I contacted upstream again, since changing city names without upstream's consent quickly leads to incompatibilities and a maintenance overhead.

I can hardly understand the "too long" argument when "Asia/Ho_Chi_Minh_City" is only 21 characters long but you can find other time zone specification as long as 30 characters, eg "America/North_Dakota/New_Salem"...

Note also that, after tzdata source inspection, I can see multiple translations of "Saigon" into "Ho Chi Minh" which is simply totally wrong.

At the minimum "Asia/Saigon" should be changed to "Asia/Ho_Chi_Minh_City", since the city name was changed to the name of the Vietnamese President after the liberation from U.S.A. people in 1975, the old name remembering to some people the old ages.

But it *really* should be changed to "Asia/Hanoi" because it is the "Vietnamese's main city" from the Vietnamese government point of view!

Microsoft have done this change (moving from "Saigon" to "Hanoi") since Windows XP, it's 6 years ago and I can't believe it takes so long to make the same with FOSS... Please don't give them arguments against us!! :-(

FYI...

Following indication from Clint Adams (see Debian's bug link at top of this page) I'm discussing this at the source: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.time.tz/2122

As Martin Pitt already said, people from tzdata have good arguments to keep going with current rules, which define time zone names using the "most populous" cities.

Hopefully they already agreed to change "Saigon" to "Ho_Chi_Minh", but there's not enough space to append "_City" to the name since the POSIX limit is 14 characters for each path component.

So as the last resort option, I'm trying to let "Hanoi" be a "link" to "Ho_Chi_Minh" so one can choose either one. Not sure if they'll agree on that since it requires more management on their side, especially if "everybody" start to ask to add link for the Capitol City...

FYI...

I've post a closing answer to this thread. Summary here:
1) no more ask for switch to Hanoi in tzdata ;
2) no more ask for Hanoi link in tzdata ;
3) confirmed the necessity to switch from "Saigon" to "Ho_Chi_Minh".

It seems that 3) is being considered by tzdata maintainers, so we'll probably close this bug soon.

As for 1) and 2) I've understood tzdata is not the right place to do this kind of change so I'll suggest another way: propose multiple city names for time zones at the user interface level, as we can see in some other systems.

Or may be simply don't change anything and explain people what is the time zone naming simple and only rule: the most populous city, and not the capitol as we usually guess it should be...

Anyway, I also understand that this change is not Ubuntu specific and so I'll eventually continue this work at the source in the Debian bug report (linked at top of this page).

Thanks to everybody having participated in this, especially Martin Pitt for the first step with upstream.

This bug was fixed in the package tzdata - 2008b-1ubuntu1

---------------
tzdata (2008b-1ubuntu1) hardy; urgency=low

  * Update to tzdata 2008b:
    - New name of "Calcutta" is "Kolkata". (LP: #155042)
    - New name of "Saigon" is "Ho Chi Minh". (LP: #121540)
  * Resynchronise with Debian. Remaining changes:
    - debian/control: Add Replaces: to locales, where tzdata was kept in
      Dapper (must be kept until after Hardy's release).
    - Build a tzdata-java package, with the help of javazic.tar.gz.uu.

tzdata (2008b-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * New upstream release.
    - Renames Asia/Saigon to Asia/Ho_Chi_Minh. closes: #471305.
  * Add conversion code for Asia/Saigon and Asia/Calcutta to
    Asia/Ho_Chi_Minh and Asia/Kolkata respectively.

 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Tue, 25 Mar 2008 12:50:36 +0100

I have remastered the Hardy beta LiveCD after having updated this package and I do confirm we can now see "Ho Chi Minh" as the default timezone choice for Vietnam in Ubiquity. So this bug can now be closed. Many thanks!