In the last few years, the following changes have been made to the tzdb project. Each of these - added no value - had a cost that far exceeded the benefits - should not have happened 1) Removal of Zone definitions from many countries. While the Zone definitions may have been the same across different countries, it was never appropriate to merge the time-zones of multiple different countries (backzone being the result). - the change caused LMT values to be lost - downstream consumers had to change logic wrt the meaning of backzone - it was culturally insensitive to not provide a primary Zone entry for some countries 2) Removal of textual short zone names. While these names may well have been invented in some cases, the had often become de facto standards - end-users complained about the loss of textual names - downstream consumers had to change logic to handle numeric-style identifiers 3) Move to a niche archive format The main archive format was changed from the well-known and widely supported gz to the niche lz format. There was and is no justification for using a niche format on a project as important as this one. - downstream consumers need to find and use the niche format - Windows does not have proper support for the niche format 4) Negative SAVE values Despite being a known fact in tzdb since 2005, and despite being warned not to in advance, a decision to re-interpret the meaning of Ireland DST was pushed through. - downstream consumers broke - the interaction with CLDR is incompatible with negative DST - the change has no impact on actual times - even if someone thought it was broken, there are no benefits to making the change 5) Fractional seconds A desire to fix subsecond data from over 50 years ago. - downstream consumers will break - the number of people who care is vanishingly small Were recent discussions a one-off, I might be prepared to let things lie, but as can be seen, there is a pattern here. Not one of these changes has added value to the project. Not one of them has been necessary to the primary mission of recording what governments are doing to their clocks now, nor even in the last 40 years. Worse, the majority are driven by a notion that getting the data "pure" trumps all problems reported by downstream consumers. It is long past time to accept that tzdb needs to focus on the primary mission - recording current government changes in a stable, backwards compatible manner. Tinkering needs to stop. Stephen