Speaking of Angola: Africa/Luanda was moved to backward in [1].
The commit message says that it's due to "now-abandoned guideline
that every ISO 3166 code should have a zone".
Ethiopia: Africa/Addis_Ababa was moved to backward in [2].
NEWS file in it tells "Some more zones have been turned into
links, when they differed from existing zones only for older
time stamps".
Using repo history only I get the impression that in 2021 you
merge zones because they were merged in 2014. I don't
understand how that process is related to (or improves)
equity, diversity or inclusion issues.
What do I miss here?

> It replaces Zones with Links when Links suffice. That way, Norway etc.
are treated like Angola etc.

The reasons mentioned in commit messages do not apply to Norway.

> The job is done now.

Sorry, I was unclear. What I meant was what is overall goal of
this refactoring. I guess steps are not that important now.

> The recent patches are orthogonal to the Kiev -> Kyiv rename

Yes, they are. But I think it still might raise concern from users.

tl;dr: Sorry, I've started to follow tz mailing list only recently, I don't
know all the historic decisions. But looking to commit messages history
only, I get a weird impression around recent changes.

[1] https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/2a18a625a0171e5c54249a54179eda3409b1b838#diff-47823b565d4a696e1db5f479faca0aa271899c05d24971730015cb294d0b6446

[2] https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/6f6f20f0bc739ce3dfd503700b793c5e459e309d

On Thu, 23 Sept 2021 at 09:52, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
On 9/22/21 2:53 AM, Almaz Mingaleev wrote:
> What equity, diversity or inclusion issues were in 2021a?

Locations in countries like Norway and Sweden got special treatment by
being Zones, whereas locations in countries like Angola and Ethiopia
were only Links.

> How does the patch solve them or make the situation better?

It replaces Zones with Links when Links suffice. That way, Norway etc.
are treated like Angola etc.

> Is there a roadmap?

The recent patches implement the last part of a long-term process that
replaced Zones with Links when Links suffice. The process started in
2013. I worked gradually; I lacked time to do it all at once.

The job is done now. There's no reason to make further changes like this.

> There were multiple requests about Kiev -> Kyiv rename.
The recent patches are orthogonal to the Kiev -> Kyiv rename, because
that city has a unique timezone history since 1970 and so gets a Zone
under the guidelines, independently of how the Zone is spelled.

> Won't it cause even more requests of that kind?

I doubt whether the change will affect the number of name-change
requests. The patches did not affect names; they merely changed some
Zones to Links.

> And the patch
> can be interpreted as prioritising some time zones over the others.

Only in the sense that the currently-prioritized timezones are those
that differ since 1970, which is a timekeeping issue that the tzdb
guidelines say is our priority. This is in contrast to 2021a, where some
timezones were prioritized for reasons unrelated to timekeeping.

> Sorry if it was already answered, I couldn't find answers to these questions
> in archives.

This stuff is scattered all over the place, unfortunately. It would be
helpful if I (or someone else) had the time to write it up. I hope this
email is enough in the meantime.

PS. I apologize for not answering your email earlier, as well as not
replying to everyone else's email. Unfortunately I'm swamped with email
now, much of it not tzdb-related. It will take time to consider all the
suggestions made recently, but because of Samoa we really need to get a
new release out soon and so will have to make do with what we have, somehow.