Paul Eggert via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote on Sat, 30 Jul 2022 at 13:01:08 EDT in <4b52574b-92b9-8967-b857-e63d471ac8ff@cs.ucla.edu>:
It's conceivable (though unlikely) that in the future some impractical politicians may rebel against the Western concept of "Universal Time" and insist on a non-integer UT offset. Something like this happened briefly in Beijing in 1949 (which attempted to impose apparent solar time, Qing dynasty style!), and there was a milder echo in 2015 when the North Korean government rebelled against JST. If a Beijing-style revolution occurs somewhere in the future it would break a lot of software, ours included; but if the revolution's leaders merely choose a non-integer UT offset we'll have an easy fix for tzdata.
I would be concerned that leaving the code in-tree encourages such "rebellion," and that is not a technical good. *shrug* -- jhawk@alum.mit.edu John Hawkinson