Zefram wrote:
For the "backward" file to be removable what you need is that the "backward" file does not contain any "active" entries. No other files containing "inactive" entries is what's needed to have an easy way of feeding only "active" entries to zic. Maybe you want both of these things?
I think Stephen wants both: he wants canonicalization, and he wants 'backward' to be removable. But 'backward' really has only the second role; it doesn't have the first one. It's reasonable to note the second role in 'Theory'. I've pushed the following proposed patch to do that; it says essentially what Stephen proposed, albeit more briefly. Canonicalization we can leave for another day. * Theory: Say that excluding 'backward' should not affect other data. Suggested by Stephen Colebourne in <http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2013-September/019939.html>. diff --git a/Theory b/Theory index 39ef7ac..13b5565 100644 --- a/Theory +++ b/Theory @@ -368,7 +368,8 @@ this relationship is not exact and is not true for 'time.tab'. Older versions of this package used a different naming scheme, and these older names are still supported. See the file 'backward' for most of these older names -(e.g. 'US/Eastern' instead of 'America/New_York'). +(e.g. 'US/Eastern' instead of 'America/New_York'); +excluding 'backward' should not affect the other data. The other old-fashioned names still supported are 'WET', 'CET', 'MET', and 'EET' (see the file 'europe').