Paul Eggert's rationale is informative https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-September/030764.html But I think there are a few more things to say. The aim of merging timezones was to avoid political issues and to reduce the maintenance burden. It seems to me that it has failed to achieve those goals. There have been several very long discussions on the topic, and the recent arguments are making exactly the same points as were made in 2013. So I think the changes have increased the amount of political discussion and controversy on the tz list, not reduced it. https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2013-May/thread.html https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2013-August/thread.html https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2013-September/thread.html Paul says in his rationale that it was a lot of extra work, and in other messages he said that he has found it hard to keep up with the discussions. So merging timezones has increased the maintenance burden, not reduced it. I have identified two policy changes that caused this argument. In 2013, Paul Eggert started a new policy of merging timezones that are the same since 1970. As far as I can tell, no-one wanted this other than Paul. This merging policy was applied first to places with small populations, and (because of alphabetical order) to Africa, which is not well-represented by the people on the TZ list. Some of the merges also ignored the guideline that each country should have at least one timezone to call its own. The other policy change was to drop the guideline that each country should have at least one timezone. This change occurred in 2019, buried at the end of a very long discussion about Vietnam, and presented as a fait accompli. https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2019-February/027602.html This was after a great deal of discussion about the need to retain country information in the tz database, back in 2013 when these changes started. As I understand it, the equity / fairness issue is that the timezone merges were implemented in an unfair manner, affecting Africa (since 2014, against the guidelines as written at the time) but not Europe. So although Paul says the merges worked without significant incident, they did in fact cause a political complaint - exactly what the merges were supposed to avoid. The current argument was triggered by the question of whether this fairness issue should be addressed by undoing the data loss in the compiled tz files that caused the complaint, or by imposing the data loss more strictly. I think the way to fix this is to revert both policy changes, and revert all the timezone merges. Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <dot@dotat.at> https://dotat.at/ Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea: Northwest 4 to 6, backing southwest 5 to 7, perhaps gale 8 later. Slight or moderate until later in Irish Sea and Lundy, otherwise moderate or rough. Rain or showers. Good, occasionally poor.