On Wed, 28 Jun 2023 at 01:26, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
Then I must not be understanding "the default IANA build should say nothing about dates before 1970-01-01", a proposal that you said was acceptable.
Re-reading the thread, I see where your confusion comes from. What I was agreeing with was the concept of removing attempts to be accurate pre-1970. I then pointed out why being completely inaccurate (all UTC) is not viable as the default. My proposal was:
The simplest approach would be to determine a rule, eg. - take the standard offset that applied on most days (modal average) for the 5 years from 1970 to 1975 - and use that pre-1970. - or, take the LMT of the city and round to the nearest hour So long as the answer is reasonable for most cases, it would be fine.
ie. I believe that if tzdb provided a fixed offset pre-1970, but one linked to LMT or common practice in that location, it would be a suitable approach for most packagers. I reckon to the nearest hour would be sufficient. Stephen