On 6/10/21 4:28 PM, Stephen Colebourne via tz wrote:
If a statement is to be made it should be in both news and theory.
Sure, that could be done. Proposed draft attached. I have not installed this in the development sources.
- no pre-1970 data in the main files (*all* pre-1970 data would be in separate files, and opt-in)
It should be easy to get the effect of this, by running the command 'make ZFLAGS=-r@0', which omits pre-1970 data in the generated TZif files. A similar option could be added to the Java-based equivalent to zic. If that doesn't suffice for some reason, we could add a flag to generate a tarball with pre-1970 data removed from the source files; this would be like the already-existing rearguard-format tarball except it would be an independent option.
- revert the patch and any previous patches that merged zones across country borders
This alternative is less appealing, for reasons already discussed. I think we're better off with a technical compromise, such as 'make' one-liner mentioned above, or something like the compromise I suggested at the start of this thread <https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-June/030220.html>.