Dear Maintainers,

First, I want to express my appreciation for the long-standing work on
tzdata and the Debian installer. I understand that timezone data ultimately
follows the IANA tzdb conventions, and that the installer UI reflects those
upstream decisions rather than any intentional editorial choice.

That said, I would like to respectfully raise a usability concern on behalf
of Korean users.

During the Debian installer's Asia timezone selection, "Korea, Republic of"
/ Asia/Seoul is not immediately discoverable, while Asia/Tokyo (Japan)
appears as a clearly prominent option. Since both regions share the UTC+9
offset with no DST, Korean users are practically guided to select
Asia/Tokyo as a workaround.

I fully understand this is likely a byproduct of alphabetical or IANA
canonical ordering, not an intentional decision. However, the practical
effect is that users in South Korea — a country with a historically and
diplomatically complex relationship with Japan — are implicitly asked to
identify their system with a Japanese locale. Even if the technical result
is identical, the experience is uncomfortable and can feel exclusionary.

For additional context: this pattern is not unique to Debian. In the
broader Linux ecosystem, Korean users have noted similar friction — for
example, some distributions' official mirror lists have historically
grouped Korea and Japan under a single regional mirror ("Asia/Japan"),
which compounds the perception that Korean users are an afterthought.

I am not suggesting any fault on the part of the Debian team. I simply hope
this context helps illustrate why visibility parity for Asia/Seoul matters
to Korean users beyond the purely technical level.

Requested improvement:
- Ensure "Korea, Republic of" / Asia/Seoul is presented with the same
prominence as Asia/Tokyo in the installer's region selection UI.
- Consider adding "South Korea" as a user-facing alias to improve
discoverability.

Thank you for your time and for maintaining such a foundational part of the
Linux ecosystem.

Best regards

Hello,

Mo Mo, le lun. 27 avril 2026 05:08:20 +0900, a ecrit:

This would probably be for tzsetup rather than tzdata, reassigning.

Is it not?

I tried to install debian 13 with all default parameters except asking
for the Korean language, it auto-configured the ko_KR locale, and the
timezone to Asia/Seoul.

I then tried to installed debian 13 in expert mode to force getting all
questions, selected Korean and South Korea, and in the clock
configuration it presented Asia/Seoul as only choice.

So, as always, we do need a reproducer scenario to be able to fix
anything, since apparently it just all works as expected.

Notably, are you perhaps actually using the live installer?

Really, that's why

https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/amd64/ch05s04#submit-bug

provides a template: we *do* need that information to be able to make
sure we reproduce your issue.

Samuel