Retry, this didn't go through 2013-09-06, due to blocking by the time zone mailing list maintainer. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Tobias Conradi <mail.2012@tobiasconradi.com> Date: Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 12:11 PM Subject: Proposal to use 1946-01-01 instead of 1970-01-01 as cutoff point To: "tz@iana.org mailing list" <tz@iana.org> Proposal to use 1946-01-01 instead of 1970-01-01 as cutoff point. The concept of country in the database is based on ISO 3166 standards. ISO at http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/country_codes.htm says: "The country names in ISO 3166 come from United Nations sources." http://www.un.org/en/aboutun/index.shtml says: "The United Nations is an international organization founded in 1945" So 1946 is the first year where on 1 January the UN existed. This new boundary would exclude to reject data improvement requests like http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2010-January/016007.html Rejection: http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2010-January/016010.html Apart from allowing easier inclusion of historic data, the new cutoff point might be easier understandable by most users, assuming the UN is more known than Unix. The new cutoff point is located after WW2 end, thus inclusion of war time offset changes is still not mandatory. -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com