On 08/28/13 09:20, Stephen Colebourne wrote:
Many users will have stored data in databases or other long term storage that refers to these time-zones being made obsolete.
The zones are not being made obsolete. TZ=America/Atikokan will still work, and will give the same results as before for post-1970 timestamps, which are the only timestamps in scope for this project. I sincerely doubt that the proposed change will cause any problem in practice. It's simply not the case that "many users" have pre-1970 timestamps for Atikokan and will notice or care about the proposed change. After all, the pre-1970 data for Atikokan was almost surely incorrect, and nobody cared about that either. That being said, I do take the point that we should not discard the old data even if it's wrong or problematic, so I'll work on a further patch that will resurrect it, along the lines already suggested.