On May 22, 2013, at 11:27 AM, random832@fastmail.us wrote:
Or, more precisely, on the subject evicting redundant timezones from the user selection menu, since of course all current names will continue to exist as links if nothing else.
I've thought about this some more, and I don't think it goes far enough. A user installing a new system doesn't _care_ about (my own proper time zone) America/Indianapolis, they don't have any need to accurately convert times from before _2006_ let alone 1970. Most users could probably be served just as well with America/New_York.
I think it would be useful - particularly if we're abandoning being able to narrow it down by country - to define a heavily cut down set of "basic" time zones, that define each set of rules that exists _now_ without care for maintaining the past back to 1970, and then offer an "advanced" option for the rest.
"The rest" would probably include most if not all UN*X systems: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/localtime.html does not contain the string 2006 anywhere in it, so I view it as making an implicit promise that localtime() can convert any value of "seconds since the Epoch" to local time, and I wouldn't assume that there are no applications that depend on that working for older dates (and that matter and will cause loud complaints by users and/or independent software vendors that version $VERSION of $UN*X broke things).