On 9/24/21 7:29 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
why are you so insistent that the only way to improve fairness is to make the default contents of tzdb strictly worse?
First, it's not strictly worse. The stuff in 'backzone' is lower quality, and adding lower-quality data is not strictly an improvement. Accuracy and sourcing has been important for the success of tzdb, and we shouldn't lose sight of that by incorporating a bunch of questionable data. Second, supporting unnecessary pre-1970 data is more work for maintainers, repackagers and (most importantly) end users for almost zero benefit. The timestamps in question are unimportant for almost every use of this database. Third, the few people who try to use these old timestamps are typically doing it wrong. The old data are magnets for errors. For example, the very few people who use Europe/Berlin naturally think that Europe/Berlin is reliable for old German timestamps. They're quite wrong: Europe/Berlin is wrong for most of Germany. This continued focus on pre-1970 timestamps is unhealthy for tzdb. It's taken waaaaayy to much of our time. We really need to tone it down.