Stephen Colebourne wrote:
- LMT isn't enough reason for a separate "full" zone
In that case, there's no reason to separate America/St_Thomas from America/Tortola, right? They differ only in LMT, so they could be links.
if you remove the "backward" file today
We are not going to remove the "backward" file. It's part of the database and is not going away. That being said, perhaps we can discuss why you have qualms about moving some of the Link directives to 'backward'. Are you trying to distinguish zone renaming from other maintenance activities? We haven't done that systematically in the past, but perhaps we should start now, if there's a reason to distinguish them.
my argument is basically to put back how this database has always worked,
First, it didn't always work the way that you described; second, when we did it that way, it led to political infighting that was unrelated to timekeeping, which is why the guideline was changed slightly. There are no timekeeping reasons to change the guideline back, only political reasons; but changing it back would lead us back into political minefields that are better avoided. Here's another way to look at it. We should insulate the tz database as much as possible from political instabilities, and that includes instabilities that entail changes to ISO 3166. If we do this, the tz database will be more stable than if we don't do it. And stability is good, right?