Marc Lehmann wrote:
why have these standards changed so drastically w.r.t. tzdata?
The standards haven't changed. Nor are the proposed changes "drastic"; they're merely nibbling around some rarely-explored edges (once the problems already pointed out have been fixed). What *has* changed is my understanding of how spurious the old Shanks-based data entries are. They're really bad. I can't prove it, but I have the strong impression that most of the entries that we haven't already checked were simply invented. If I'd known how bad they were I would not have put them there in the first place.
most people seem to have been concerned about stability of timestamps. not about accuracy, correctness or regression testing.
I doubt whether there's a genuine lack of concern about accuracy or correctness. On the contrary, I think we all want the data to be as accurate and correct as it can be. The only dispute here is how much stability trumps these other concerns.