On 08/08/14 23:22, Tim Parenti wrote:
I think points 1, 2, and 4 are pretty much undisputed. Point 3 is the current point of contention, but I think we should be moving to a solution wherein data like this that somehow got into previous releases despite having no basis in fact should be removed from the main files and instead be added to a separate file for data of "dubious" provenance, which users can choose to use or ignore at-will.
The problem here is simply 'users can choose to use or ignore at-will' if that is done at a distribution level! I've never had a problem that some of the data's accuracy can be disputed, and I do feel that the ignoring of pre-1970 data has been overcome - the Russian data is nice to see - but if the answers returned when checking historic data on a timezone depend on what data has been loaded then we are back with the problem! I've reached the point where I'd rather see a 'not available' rather than a 'this is todays guess' so we KNOW we have to switch to an alternate source? Paul - Getting things second correct is perhaps where some of the problem is coming from. I'd just be happy with hour correct. Anything better is just a bonus, but while 5 years ago normalizing data was probably a rarity, things like Derick's port of data to PHP has meant that we are using this as a reference today! In the future I CAN see a case for storing the version of tz used along with the timezone on a normalization. That may sound like overkill, but it is the only way to detect that something has changed ... -- 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