Stephen Colebourne wrote:
These are groups/teams for whom packaging/repackaging is their normal role. Its not comparable.
Sure it's comparable. We're not talking about crack teams of dozens of software maintainers. We're talking only about a simple script that I wrote in a few minutes, a script that can be run automatically. This sort of thing is routine in software, and it's not reasonable to dismiss it merely on the grounds that it is "packaging/repackaging".
every user of these libraries has gone to IANA for the files for over 15 years
No, as IANA didn't start hosting the data until 2011. Users of these libraries evidently didn't have much trouble switching to iana.org, and they won't have much trouble switching to joda.org either.
why not change zic or the tooling to alter the flag in the case of Ireland?
Because we're trying to model Irish time as best we can, and this includes modeling Irish Standard Time as standard time.
We have had an agreement for many years
No, we never had any agreement to freeze the format. The zic input format has evolved in the past, and it will undoubtedly continue to evolve in the future.