By the fact that you are completely dodging the question ("A person in Kenya will be better off by having Oslo merged with Berlin because:..."), my only conclusion can be that in fact you have no answer; that you cannot spell out a concrete case where a person in Kenya is disadvantaged by the merger of Oslo with Berlin. Why make a change if it doesn't help anyone, and has the potential to do considerable damage?

Secondly, your analogy with COVID is even more misplaced. Instead of "If we give COVID-19 shots to people in San Francisco but not Los Angeles, purely for reasons unrelated to public health...", what you are proposing is analogous to de-vaccinating all the people in San Francisco so that they are on the same level as Los Angeles. That is a pretty extreme form of "equity".

I'm sure you're trying to do the right thing here, but the nearly unanimous response to your proposal should give you pause, and give us all time to consider issues that have been raised. During my career I've seen many cases where it seemed that some small quick change would have some benefit, but it had to be retracted when it blew up in our faces. Being a core piece of technology for all computers, mobile phones, etc. with many, many players all needing to work in concert so that everything interoperates is a heavy responsibility, and not one to be taken lightly. Please don't rush into this.

Mark

On Fri, Sep 24, 2021 at 12:09 AM Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

On 9/23/21 9:00 PM, Mark Davis ☕ wrote:
> My chief concern is instability and incompatibility

2021a1 will give you maximum stability and compatibility with 2021a, so
you can use that if equity is not as much of a concern for you.

> why is it so very, very important to make this change right now

The equity issue has been on the table for months, no other approach has
been developed or tested, and the only other approaches proposed would
be less stable and compatible than the already built-and-tested 2021b
would be.

The equity issue was raised early this year, and we've delayed dealing
with it for far too long already. Equity is a real issue of concern, and
it's a bad look for us if we continue with a clearly-inequitable primary
distribution when a fairer approach has long been implemented and
available and nothing else is available.

This is mostly a disagreement about maintenance philosophy not end-user
functionality, as the pre-1970 differences between 2021a1 and 2021b will
be minor when considered from end users' point of view. We know this
because we've made similar changes many times in previous releases.

I'll be happy to collaborate on building something that will accommodate
our philosophical differences in later releases, and have already
proposed specific (though not-yet-installed) working code that goes a
long way toward doing that. Having had some experience with writing and
testing that code, I have confidence that this technical approach will
succeed if the community wants to work together on this. Of course there
will be issues - among other things, the
at-least-one-Zone-per-country-code philosophy is even more
unstable/incompatible than 2021b will be - but they're clearly solvable.