Stephen Colebourne wrote:
On 29 August 2013 21:18, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
As we've seen, similar changes have been made to the tz database regularly, and evidently those users didn't notice or care. What's different about these changes?
Firstly, there are a lot of recent changes.
Sure, but there were more changes in the past, and they didn't cause problems.
Secondly, some of them are more political than in the past, notably cross border.
Sorry, but that's incorrect. The past changes were cross-border and were more political than the current proposal. For example, a year after the Siege of Sarajevo (the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare, and the focus of an intensely bitter Balkan war), we merged Sarajevo with Belgrade, on the grounds that their post-1970 time stamps were identical. Nobody noticed or cared. Nothing in the current proposal is remotely close to that merger, in terms of political controversy. So our practical experience suggests that the proposed changes won't cause any real problems.
Add a "historical data reliability" indicator to each zone. Say, the earliest date from which the data is regarded as being acceptably reliable.
I'm afraid that sounds like a lot of work, and it's not something that can be reliably determined -- at least, not unless we arbitrarily put in "1970" for a large majority of entries, and then what's the point?
I'm not that interested in resurrecting long dead data
OK, in that case we can make the attic smaller, and use it more on a going-forward basis, with 2003d as the starting point. This will be a smaller change to the database now, which I assume is a good thing.