Stephen Colebourne via tz <tz@iana.org> writes:
[ assorted proposals ]
One other issue that I think deserves more attention than it has gotten lately is that tzdb has become a de facto standard and users rely on its stability. I would like to see some sort of principle adopted that minimizes changes in historical data. In particular, I think it's past time to prohibit data changes adopted for essentially-administrative reasons (as opposed to new findings of historical fact). I'd put the recent reorganization under the heading of things that would be forbidden by this principle, and also the changes a few years ago that removed "made up" zone abbreviations. Whatever the justification for those abbreviations originally, some people had come to depend on them, and little was to be gained by removing them. Looking at Stephen's list with this in mind, one thing I'd vote against is redefining the LMT offsets. Yeah, I suggested that myself a few days ago, but that was in the context of what seemed to be a fait accompli that would largely destroy tzdb's backward compatibility anyway. If we're going to reverse that choice and try to preserve the existing pre-1970 data, then preserving the existing LMT data goes along with that. The idea of having at least one zone per ISO-3166-1 country does seem like a good one, though. Aside from possibly deflecting politically-based complaints, this seems basically like future proofing: even if two countries have shared clocks since 1970, they could diverge at any time. Being prepared with an appropriate zone name should minimize the pain to users. Also notice that splitting an existing zone creates no compatibility problems, since no one is obligated to switch to the new zone name immediately. regards, tom lane