On Jul 10, 2014, at 2:39 PM, Paul Eggert <eggert@CS.UCLA.EDU> wrote:
David Patte ₯ wrote:
the relationship of the records in question is coincidental, and therefore the records should remain separate
This is a good point, and in some cases in hindsight I went too far in merging zones that were coincidentally the same (e.g., merging Antarctica/Syowa with Africa/Nairobi), so I'll undo those changes soon. However, in many cases the relationship is not coincidental, as we're talking about most-likely-invented data from a single source, and for these cases we can safely discard the spurious data.
This is not a question about optimizing the implementation; it's a question of having the tz data reflect our knowledge as accurately as the current format allows. Currently the tz database pretends to know more than it does, and to the extent that we can make it more honest and accurate we should do so.
This makes a lot of sense. The TZ source is a cultural/legal data repository, so it should group things together if they are the same thing in those worlds. paul