* Clive D. W. Feather:
Florian Weimer via tz said:
I'm not sure if the above is an appropriate characterization, but I want to point out that switching much of Europe to Europe/Berlin will leaves us ill-equipped to deal with future time zone fragmentation after mandatory DST has been abolished in Europe, and different countries make different choices.
I disagree. In fact, I think it's scaremongering.
Ignoring Ireland, which is already a special case, and overseas territories, which aren't affected anyway, there's only three current timezones in the EU (in terms of current rules, ignoring all history ever). If, for example Sweden decides to stay on winter time and the rest of the EU decide to stay on +2, then we split Europe/Stockholm back off Europe/Berlin *and do nothing else*. This is exactly the same as if we suddenly discovered that Sweden had changed time a week later than everyone else in 1984. And is no more work than if we'd discovered that Berwick-on-Tweed hadn't observed BST in 1976.
The benefit of the current scheme is that users can keep using Europe/Stockholm (or the local equivalent for most European countries) before and after the migration off DST. This means they will be able to implement the migration without a configuration change, just with a software update. If we tell them to switch to Europe/Berlin first, and then to some other city outside their country, that creates unnecessary work and friction. Thanks, Florian