Tim Parenti wrote:
If you assert that the rest of the changes are also better for similar reasons
No, that's too strong. I assert only that the rest of the changes are so small that they won't cause significant problems in practice with real-world time stamps from the era. This is based not only our experience with doing these tz changes in the past (we've done 'em, multiple times, for many years, with no problems reported); it's based also on my experience with the few applications that could conceivably use this old data (mostly astrology, but also earthquake records and the like), and on my reading of contemporaneous sources. Timekeeping simply wasn't that accurate back then. The changes in question alter timestamps by a few minutes in areas where timekeeping was so sloppy that people at the time wouldn't have noticed or cared about the change. This attitude toward timekeeping still persists in some parts of the world. Last month I talked to someone who recently lived in smaller cities of Ethiopia. Many residents have reasonably high-precision time available on their cell phones. They ignore it, and use Ethiopian time -- some use Arab time, which is equally imprecise -- so that meetings are scheduled to a precision of an hour or three, maybe, if you're lucky. This is the normal state of affairs for most of the timestamps under discussion, except that people back then didn't even have cell phones to ignore. This is why I have no qualms about the experimental post-2014f Russia changes <https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/3c0c83726c1746c77d9b3ebca085d9a041d6f6e7>. They're small changes to old time stamps, and they're not going to break practical applications, even if they happen to impose Bolshevik timestamps on White Army areas, which some probably do.
there is no such thing as "removing" data from an end user's perspective
This objection would have merit if end users cared about this data to 1-second precision. But they don't. And they're right to not care.
Perhaps frustratingly, the first task would be to restore the zone data (and associated commentary) removed in 2013e and 2014f to this new area.
I already did that, privately, a few weeks ago. This shouldn't be limited to data removed in the last year or two -- it should contain all dubious data ever removed, going back to the 1990s. (I've done that too.)
the simplest approach would be to add a Makefile target which compiles the standard files as usual, then compiles the dubious data with a separate call to zic.
Yes, I've done that too, and I'd be fine with that.