On Wed, Sep 22, 2021 at 6:09 AM dpatte via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
Iso is a living international standard, and it's their mandate, not the mandate of timezone collectors to do the negotiation and diplomacy in order to arrive at and maintain the world standard.
I certainly don't believe we have the mandate or skillset to ignore the international standard widely used in modern computer technology.
What we have done is divide the world into regions based on how people keep time. That this doesn't always distinguish countries is not a problem. One could make an argument that the scale of possible future changes might make it sensible to have countries to properly handle future events, but that is not the argument the country people are making, unless I missed it. What the argument seems to be is that users want their country in the list when picking a timezone, which can be handled by mapping more places to a tzdb defined timezone. That's different from squashing based on post-1970. Sincerely, Watson Ladd