Howard Hinnant via tz <tz@iana.org> writes:
By putting more data into backzone, this greatly increases the odds that some vendors are going to adopt backzone, and other’s won’t. That’s a fork. **************
Well, no. The objections to a fork in this thread are based on (very reasonable) concerns about duplicated maintenance effort, lack of one source of truth, and so on. This would not be that. However, you have a very good point that if any significant number of vendors start including backzone to restore some approximation of the way things stood before, then there is going to be the same mess from end users' standpoint as a true fork would produce. There will be more than one "canonical" version of tzdb, and that's going to be barely distinguishable from a true fork in terms of confusion on the ground.
I would instead like to see a move in the opposite direction: Consolidation to a single accepted version of the data, even if flawed, that slowly gets better as time goes on.
+1 regards, tom lane