On 29 May 2021 10:00:54 BST, Stephen Colebourne via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
I don't see anyone objecting to a lack of historic time zone data within a single modern country. But merging zones across modern countries isn't acceptable.
As maintainer of the PHP (and Hack, and MongoDB) implementations and data packages, I can assure you that I'm 100% in agreement with everything Stephen is saying. Messing with the data by deleting large parts of it without any other benefit is a terrible idea. I'm annoyed to have to say that this recurring "cleaning up" has been happening since Paul has taken over the maintainership here. I very much preferred ado's stance of maintenence of current rules, and leaving the old data alone. As Stephen says, backwards compatibility matters. cheers, Derick