On 13/08/14 18:28, Peter Ilieve wrote:
We have been trying to get to a point where the historic tz data is
stable and acceptable to everyone. … I don’t think that is an achievable goal.
I write that as someone who broke the stability of UK historical data by finding a lot of the old Summer Time Orders and other regulations, work continued and pretty much finished by Joseph Myers.
That sort of thing will probably, and should, continue. Some keen youngster in Elbonia will discover the tz data (maybe her Linux box doesn’t follow a short-notice summer time change) and will remember that her grandfather was a senior official in the Elbonian ministry of the interior, and there is a trunk full of his old stuff in her parents’ attic. Before we know it we will have decades of accurate history for Elbonia, traceable to primary sources, but different from the current tz data. That is a Good Thing, beating stability any day.
That is perhaps my point. There is more and more historic data coming out of the woodwork and some of the less developed countries see to be doing a better job of scanning and indexing that material so it's freely available. tzdist has to be based on a complete set of available history, Something that has a cutoff of 1970 will not be acceptable at which point the mechanism for recording and updating the underlying documentation becomes more important. -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk