Mark Davis ☕️ <mark@macchiato.com> writes:
Deprecated implies they will go away at some point
That is not necessarily the case. In Unicode we have deprecated certain characters, but we make it very clear that they will *never* be removed. Nor does it mean that implementations have to ignore them if they are passed to the implementation. What it does mean is that people are strongly discouraged from generating them in implementations. So they shouldn't be on keyboards, or in character pickers.
Perhaps the root of the problem, or at least a problem, are these varying definitions of deprecated. Stephen appears to have assumed that presence in the backward file implies a strong version of deprecated and he or someone else has encoded that assumption into Joda-Time, hence Joda-Time's "canonicalization" of links. But that belief appears to me to have been an assumption unsupported by any documentation or intent on the part of the tzdata maintainers, hence all the problems that approach has caused over the years. I believe tzdata intends little more than "these two names point to the same data" and is not intending to imply that one of them should be avoided in new uses, let alone that either of them would ever go away. But that's just an assumption on my part. Spelling it out explicitly would be good. -- Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>