Date:        Sat, 15 Jul 2000 21:04:29 -0400
    From:        Laine Stump <lainestump@rcn.com>
    Message-ID:  <4.3.2.7.0.20000715204740.00bab100@pop.rcn.com>

  | I'll say! I would consider Boston and Washington D.C. to both be major 
  | cities, but neither is listed.

The rule is the largest population centre in the timezone.   That avoids
either listing every town (or hovel) that anyone wants to claim is "major"
or disputes about which ones should be listed and which should not.

  | (Although "Dawson_Creek" is.) How very, er, *odd*.

I know nothing about that case, but most likely it is a different timezone.
All that requires is that at some time or other (since standardised time
anyway) the local wall clock times differed (different DST rules, or no DST
one year, or ...)

  | I thought the old way worked just fine.

It did as long as entire regions had a common timezone - it failed badly
whenever there were exceptions within the region that are different.
It is almost inconceivable to imagine a timezone without a population
centre to use it, so the current rule scales quite well, and produces
(almost) a minimal set of names - it is also pretty easy to use, as most
people can easily pick the biggest city (or two) that shares their zone.

  | (BTW, I think I'll leave mine as US/Eastern until support for it is 
  | completely removed. *Anything* to avoid an explicit reference to New York 
  | on my machine! ;-)

I actually install the timezone by removing the symlink, and then copying
the appropriate zoneinfo file into /etc/localtime.  That saves some path
traversals (a meaningless trivial gain) and makes time conversions work
in single use mode (when /usr/share doesn't exist).  It loses the documentation
provided by the symlink of what is actually installed, and where to look for
replacements.   In your case, you'd lose the explicit reference...

kre