Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2021 09:15:58 -0700 From: Paul Eggert via tz <tz@iana.org> Message-ID: <190b4056-9ed0-f876-c32a-acb13185d114@cs.ucla.edu> | Such a fork would arbitrarily discriminate against countries like Angola | and Niger, and in favor of countries like Norway and Sweden. | | A primary goal of the recent patches was to avoid racial or national | preferences that were present in the previous setup. Arguably these | preferences were not intentional, or were apparent and not real; | however, that's not an argument I would want to defend. Whatever the underlying merits of all of this, that argument is pure BS. If the project were actively preventing some data from being included for any spurious reasons, there would be a problem - but as best I can tell that has never happened. Further, this is a volunteer (ie: zero resources) project - we don't have the ability (in general) to go find missing data, no matter why it is missing. We rely upon someone being interested, and sending us the data. If they do that, and we have no reason to believe it is bogus data, we install it - it doesn't need to be perfect, just someone's honest belief that some region had some particular time behaviour sometime in the past, ideally supported by some kind of research. If more accurate data comes to light later, we improve things. If someone in (or from) Angola or Niger wants th research their timezone history, and send it, it should be included, just like that for the US, France, or Norway (etc). There is no discrimination here, and there never has been, and (aside from perhaps sometimes on what the name of a zone should be) I've never even heard of a suggestion that there might be. That argument is simply absurd. Personally, I've always believed that there should be at least one zone for every time zone authority on the planet - it simply makes things easier for everyone. For the users as once they have picked the zone that applies to them, they're unlikely to need a change, and when that might happen, the event will be very well known inside the zone (areas of a region that used to share the same timezone being split between two times). For the project, it means that we don't need to keep creating new zones every time some authority decides to alter things in a way that makes them different than other nearby regions - it really would not take much time at all for authorities to realise that if they were decide to more the clocks forward for 5 seconds of summer time between 03:00 and 04:00 (local time) some Sunday in mid winter, they'd then be entitled to their own private timezone, according to our rules. This isn't something that we ought to be encouraging. The only real cost is a little extra processing time generating the zones, and a trivial amount of zone data files. kre