Stephen Colebourne via tz <tz@iana.org> writes:
This is a formal request to revert the recent patch to merge country timezones. I, and others, consider the patch to be utterly unacceptable. The patch causes meaningful harm to the status of tzdb, and will cause downstream projects significant pain to effectively revert the changes - amounting to an effective fork of the project.
While I have no idea whether this change amounts to a "breach of charter", I second Stephen's opinion that there is effectively going to be a fork if the change is not reverted. It seems highly unlikely to me that users of Postgres will consider it acceptable for old timestamps in their databases to suddenly change meaning. When that happens because better information came to light about past timekeeping, it's somewhat defensible. But there won't be any quarter given for "the tzdb maintainers decided to just toss all this old data overboard". I just experimented and confirmed that including backzone isn't nearly sufficient to bring the output data back to what it was previously. So that's not likely to be a satisfactory answer for us, and if there is a fork then we will probably follow it. Disclaimer: this is just MHO; it is not (yet) Postgres project policy. regards, tom lane