Stephen Colebourne via tz said:
This is a formal request to revert the recent patch to merge country timezones.
The tzdb coordinator is expected to operate by this charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6557
""" The TZ Coordinator is empowered to decide, as the designated expert, appropriate changes, but SHOULD take into account views expressed on the mailing list. ...
The criteria for updates to the database include the following:
1. New TZ names (e.g., locations) are only to be created when the scope of the region a name was envisioned to cover is no longer accurate.
2. In order to correct historical inaccuracies, a new TZ name MAY be added when it is necessary to indicate what was the consensus view at a given time and location. Such TZ names are usually not added when the inaccuracy was prior to 1970.
3. Changes to existing entries SHALL reflect the consensus on the ground in the region covered by that entry.
To be clear, the TZ Coordinator SHALL NOT set time zone policy for a region but use judgment and whatever available sources exist to assess what the average person on street would think the time actually is, or in case of historical corrections, was. """
None of those are relevant to this matter, and "include" means that they aren't the only criteria that can be used.
I contend that to date, the TZ coordinator has not actively shown any serious willingness to accept that the proposed changes are unacceptable to a significant segment of tzdb users. As such, the coordinator has not taken into account the views of the mailing list.
Equally, anything like this gets a lot of noise from those against it but - often - silence from those who think it's a reasonable idea. I think it would be a good idea for those who support the change to actually say so. For the record, I'm agnostic on this. I don't think it's wonderful, but I don't see it as harmful either.
yet it is clear that the proposed change *adds* historical inaccuracies.
Point 3 refers to changes, but only in terms that reflect what people in the relevant location would have considered the time zone to have been, yet clearly the proposed change does not do that.
Since most zones in the database are amalgamations of pre-1970 zones, such "inaccuracies" have always been there and some people in the zone would have not said they were correct. So what? As far as I can see, the zones are accurate for all of their area post-1970 and part of their area pre-1970. This change doesn't alter that.
nor to increase the number of historical inaccuracies.
If the data was being changed so that an entry was wrong for *everywhere* in the zone pre-1970 or *somewhere* in the zone post-1970, then that would be increasing the number of inaccuracies. But that's not what is happening here. Nobody ever promised that a zone was accurate pre-1970 for the entire area. -- Clive D.W. Feather | If you lie to the compiler, Email: clive@davros.org | it will get its revenge. Web: http://www.davros.org | - Henry Spencer Mobile: +44 7973 377646