Guy Harris wrote:
If it's an entry for Paris, rather than for the French time zone, why don't we have entries for Lyon and Lille and ...
It's because of the 1970 cutoff. We would have entries such as you describe, if we changed the cutoff to (say) 1940 rather than 1970. Europe/Paris would split into 28 zones (if we accept the Shanks data), each with its own timestamp history. But the entry for Europe/Paris itself would not need to change. So, in the sense of surviving zone splits better, Europe/Paris is more an entry for Paris than it is an entry for all of France. I agree that the LMT offsets are notional, but even so, requiring them to be multiples of an hour feels ahistorical. Before standard time was observed people simply didn't set their clocks to hour-multiples offsets, and it would be odd to pretend that they did.