On 1 September 2013 05:14, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
Stephen Colebourne wrote:
The Theory change reinstates the one zone per ISO-3166 region requirement.
I'm afraid that's incorrect. That change would strengthen the requirement beyond what it ever was, by requiring a Zone to be present for every country. That has never been required and has never been the practice in the tz database.
You are mistaken. You removed the requirement in commit https://github.com/jodastephen/tz/commit/d3b025adb25554ee10b986850371e573df9... It was first added 16 years ago in commit https://github.com/jodastephen/tz/commit/9d0f6c217dc26489d32e7fb119ea29fecf7... This patch simply reinstates the long-standing practice of the database.
There is no timekeeping reason to undo the changes already agreed upon in this area and incorporated in the 2013d stable release, nor is there any timekeeping reason to add the proposed requirement. It's purely a political requirement.
The politics is of your own making. (The 2013d release is essentially faulty because of this) Removing this rule has caused much of this debate. Reinstating it is entirely appropriate.
The other changes in that proposed patch seem to be an attempt to implement the Theory change. While not affecting timestamps (they are internal administration), they use a style that emphasizes the roles of countries more. This would increase the future political pressures on tz database maintenance, and I don't see how that would be a step forward. We should be deemphasizing political issues, not emphasizing them more.
They are nothing more than a reversal of all your recent damaging changes which I thought you'd agreed to revert. They simply put back the correct and long-standing way of working for the tzdb. ISO-3166 codes are important to the vast majority of actual applications that care about time-zones. They are widely used as the canonical definition of countries/territories/regions and are used without political issue by others. I have no idea why the use of the most widely accepted standard in this are makes things worse. Anyway, the patch simply undoes the damage caused since May 2013. It doesn't add anything new. Stephen