On Sat, 29 May 2021 at 01:02, Paul Eggert via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
> On 5/28/21 1:44 PM, Stephen Colebourne via tz wrote:
> > For example, Norway's and Sweden's time zone history is being wiped
> > out in favour of that of Germany. Can no-one here see the political
> > sensitivity in that?
>
> In hindsight

In hindsight, it was a mistake for Joda-Time to accept null values in the API. But I don't go around breaking millions of people's code because my views on the topic have changed. Backwards compatibility matters.

> it was a political decision to create entries for Norway
> and Sweden and thus elevate them above other regions that lack entries.
> So, yes, I can see political sensitivity in removing that elevation.

Nonsense. Regions have names. That makes them political. Norway and Sweden are *countries*, not regions.

If I were to call up the Norwegian or Swedish ambassador on Monday and tell them you were wiping their country off the time zone map and replacing them with Germany, I suspect there might be a diplomatic incident  by Friday.

> Here's another way to put it. Why should we maintain Norway and Sweden's
> time zone histories, when we don't maintain the histories for Guangdong,
> KwaZulu-Natal, Thanh Hóa, or Uttar Pradesh?

Because they are regions of the same country! (today and in the recent past)

>  Aside from politics, these
> regions are similar: although all the regions have distinct timestamp
> histories with data that I can cite, all the regions can be merged into
> other tzdb regions (Norway into Berlin, Guangdong into Shanghai, etc.)
> if we consistently limit tzdb's scope to regions that differ after 1970.
> Given all that, why should Norway and Sweden continue to be special?
>
> These are not particularly-obscure examples, as Guangdong etc. all have
> more people than Norway or Sweden do. It would be political to continue
> to focus on Norway and Sweden while excluding Guangdong etc. purely for
> reasons unrelated to timekeeping.

Time zone regions in tzdb don't exist for your convenience, they exist for downstream users who have certain expectations of the database. And those expectations are shaped by many years experience of tzdb and the world in general.

Timekeeping is by its very nature a product of Governmental decision making. This means that Governmental authorities, whether recognized countries or not, are a natural part of the problem space. Guangdong et al are not modern countries. No Governmental authority has made a time zone decision in those areas for many years.

I don't see anyone objecting to a lack of historic time zone data within a single modern country. But merging zones across modern countries isn't acceptable.

Stephen