Stephen Colebourne wrote:
As we have discussed before, changes like this are disruptive to many people. The LMT and early time values are used out there, irrespective of their accuracy.
It was discussed at some length, and to some extent we're just repeating that discussion now. There's one thing new, though: we now have had significant practical experience. The earlier set of changes along these lines was published in release 2013e (2013-09-19), and it hasn't caused significant disruption in the field. In practice it seems that end users don't much care about things like the time zone of Guadeloupe in 1899 -- which is probably a good thing, since the pre-2013e database was wrong anyway. I understand that simplifying away spurious pre-1970 timestamps can cause more work for detailed regression testing, but that kind of work should be routine as the tz database is always mutating for other reasons anyway. Besides, the tail should not be wagging the dog here: regression testing should be our servant, not our master.