On Thursday, May 23 2013, "Robert Elz" wrote to "random832@fastmail.us, tz@iana.org list" saying:
But (again personally) I'd like to gradually push the tzdata reference point backwards, there are systems that can represent times before the epoch, and it would be good to be able to correctly convert those as well- at least back to about the beginnings of standardised time (or the earliest that can be represented on the system if that is later than the beginning of standardiesd time).
Pushing the reference point earlier than the passage of the U.S. Uniform Time Act (April 13, 1966) would be a terrible idea. Prior to that, in the U.S., Daylight Savings rules were under local control, and were thus insanely complicated as different municipalities could (and did) make up their own rules. Trying to record all this knowledge would be a huge amount of work, and increase the number of U.S. zones enormously, for (IMO) almost no practical gain. Given that, I don't think there's much benefit to pushing the reference point back less than four years. -- Jonathan Lennox lennox@cs.columbia.edu