Eliot Lear wrote:
what problem are we trying to solve at this moment? What is broken that needs fixing? I seem to have lost the plot on that.
As for the LMT issue, the problem there seems to be one of documenting better what 'LMT' means in the database, which I've been trying to do. This stuff has all been in my head for years, but it's not obvious to newcomers. As for the changes that discarded some pre-1970 data, the underlying problem is the unnecessary proliferation of entries due to political constraints. These entries unnecessarily complicate users' lives, add to our maintenance burden, and prompt endless political disputes. We can't remove politically-motivated entries due to backward-compatibility concerns, but we should not proliferate them further, as this project should be about timekeeping, not politics. P.S. I should mention that the politics are in the guidelines only because of my own mistake when I wrote them way back when. I intended to keep politics out as much as possible (which is partly why the Zone naming convention is as successful as it is), but I slipped up when documenting zone.tab.