> Deprecated implies they will go away at some point

That is not necessarily the case. In Unicode we have deprecated certain characters, but we make it very clear that they will never be removed. Nor does it mean that implementations have to ignore them if they are passed to the implementation. What it does mean is that people are strongly discouraged from generating them in implementations. So they shouldn't be on keyboards, or in character pickers.

Mark

On Fri, Oct 8, 2021 at 9:19 AM Russ Allbery via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:

Stephen Colebourne via tz <tz@iana.org> writes:
> On Fri, 8 Oct 2021 at 07:20, Clive D.W. Feather <clive@davros.org> wrote:

>> Where does "the project" talk about deprecating IDs at all? Not in the
>> theory file.

> There is a frequently expressed view that lots of IDs in tzdb only
> exist for backwards compatibility.

Many things in computing exist for backwards compatibility but are not
deprecated. Deprecated implies they will go away at some point. So far
as I can tell, no such implication has ever been stated for, for example,
link entries in backwards.

--
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>