I realize that this is not within the control of Ubuntu/Canonical, but they must participate on International standards committees.
To that end, I would like to raise a topic of discussion for those Committees.
Does it seem reasonable that Citizens of any Country would expect that one of the Timezone identifiers relate to their own country’s Capital City?
If there is much public support for such a stance, should the Standards Committees consider putting forward a proposal to have the relevant entries added to those that are listed under the various
/usr/share/zoneinfo/*
even if only as symlinks, similar to
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Mar 19 10:04 Montreal -> Toronto
Canonical only packages what https://www.iana.org/time-zones releases, you would have to ask upstream to extend the DB else Ubuntu would differ from agreed standards …
With the sentence above I find it slightly ironic that neither of these cities is a Capital (you could have picked Ottawa as one of the sides of that demo link )
Given that time zone names and standards are set by IANA which has much wider and broader impacts on ALL things timezone related, and not Ubuntu or Debian, I don’t think that this ask is valid.
IANA chooses city names for Timezone definitions. They define the standards. Diverging from those standards in Ubuntu doesn’t really help anything. In fact, it makes it more confusing to offer timezone links that are not part of the standard.
If you feel so strongly about this, you should take it up with IANA, not Ubuntu. That will get a wider view and input and discussion base.
Ubuntu/Canonical are not really the proper place to raise this discussion. And even if Canonical has a presence in the discussion forums with IANA, Canonical likely doesn’t have enough sway with the Time Zone Coordinators to make anything happen, so you need to raise your proposals at IANA/ICANN.
I gave an example of a symlink. I wasn’t giving an example of a Capitol. But that symlink is an officially included symlink for some reason, probably because of it being the location for the headquarters of The International Air Transport Association, likely impacting global air traffic control and multi-national systems coordination.
As it is, I had already created the following on my computer,
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Jun 6 13:33 Ottawa -> Toronto
But, when I go to the TZ selector App, and search for the City (a.k.a. Ottawa) that is not found! So that change may not be replicated when I advance to a newer version of Ubuntu.
Thank you, Thomas, I appreciate your taking the time to point that out (for those who might not be aware) but, for myself, I was already aware of that.
Precisely because Ubuntu distros are being adopted by governments as a foundation for their server systems, it would seem quite straightforward that those multiple jurisdictions would try to leverage their platform provider’s technical teams (a.k.a. Committe memberships) to influence the evolution of how such standards evolve to incorporate Client organization preferences (pride of Country and all that).
P.S. I have worked in a multi-national corporate IT group and did some prep work for someone who was tasked as a representative on Working Groups for multiple Telecom standards bodies, so I have some sense of how some of this happens. Which is why I did suggest this was for consideration by those members at Ubuntu/Canonical, who are on such committees.
Well, yeah, the actual timezone data is usually read from a database not through the file system, so your symlink is only helpful for apps that “screen scrape” the directory instead of talking to the DB…
I’d personally have ripped out all tzdata exposure from our installer long ago and would simply make the system use geolocation data (based on network information) to set its timezone on its own (and only expose a setting to the user in offline installs)… but that is probably the reason why I don’t work in the desktop team
(you could have picked Ottawa as one of the sides of that demo link 
)
So that change may not be replicated when I advance to a newer version of Ubuntu.