On Wed, May 22, 2013, at 16:00, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
In any case, to answer the general topic, I would argue that the "advanced" stuff is the set of time zones that people don't normally use. There are over 1000 time zones in tzdata. Most people don't use more than one and don't care that most of them exist. They just pick America/New_York or Europe/Paris or whatever and it works just fine. I don't see any benefit in merging any of that.
By "merging" I don't mean _actually_ merging anything in the database, I mean _expecting_ people to pick New_York (or, for example, a single CET zone, whichever one it may be, whether they're in France or Germany or Norway...), and putting the extra dozens of timezones that are the same today behind an 'advanced' screen. I simply titled this thread that because merging was what Paul Eggert's less ambitious proposal was stated in terms of.