Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> writes:
On 9/24/21 7:29 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
why are you so insistent that the only way to improve fairness is to make the default contents of tzdb strictly worse?
First, it's not strictly worse. The stuff in 'backzone' is lower quality, and adding lower-quality data is not strictly an improvement. Accuracy and sourcing has been important for the success of tzdb, and we shouldn't lose sight of that by incorporating a bunch of questionable data.
That argument was perhaps true before May. There is no justification for calling much of what you moved in May "lower quality".
Second, supporting unnecessary pre-1970 data is more work for maintainers, repackagers and (most importantly) end users for almost zero benefit. The timestamps in question are unimportant for almost every use of this database.
These arguments might be a reason for removing pre-1970 data altogether. They are not a reason for simply moving it to another file (and, in a default build, replacing it with clearly-inferior data that end users cannot easily tell is wrong). That does not improve anything. regards, tom lane