Russ Allbery via tz <tz@iana.org> writes:
I think you have not understood the post to which you are replying.
Your objection that started this recent discussion is solely contained in the naming layer. You are objecting to the change to where Europe/Oslo points (and similar changes). Viewed through the separation of the timekeeping data set and the naming layer, your objection is that Europe/Oslo used to point to TZ1386 (or whatever), which contains historical data (of whatever quality) for Oslo, and now points to TZ1490 (or whatever), which contains historical data for Berlin.
Nothing has changed about the rulesets. Nothing has changed about the recorded history. What has changed is where the *name* Europe/Oslo points, since it becomes an alias to Europe/Berlin instead of pointing to a separate ruleset (which still exists).
Your concern can therefore be completely addressed in the naming layer by pointing the name Europe/Oslo back at TZ1386.
As a theoretical argument, that's great. Given a few months or a year, maybe we could even implement such a model. The problem at hand is what are we going to ship *tomorrow*. There's no time to make such a thing happen. A secondary problem is that with or without a additional layer of indirection, what end users in Norway are going to care about is whether "Europe/Oslo" gives the same results it used to in a default build of tzdb. No amount of mechanism is going to let us escape making that decision. Nor does it seem like having multiple popular variants of tzdb will be a great outcome. regards, tom lane