Andrew Gierth <andrew@tao11.riddles.org.uk> writes:
But the real point here is that we _want_ some of the backward zones - especially the ones that users may have legitimately configured with tzsetup (which reads zone.tab / zone1970.tab) in the past but which got renamed (as in the recent example of America/Godthab). The problem right now is that there isn't a way to conveniently distinguish those zones from the ones that just get in the way and cause confusion. This is why my proposal retains in the "backward" file every zone that has ever been in zone.tab.
It's not clear to me whether your proposal includes removal of the newly "deprecated" zones from the default build rule. If it doesn't, then this is just paper-shuffling so far as many (most?) consumers of tzdata are concerned. It gets considerably more real if the proposal is to not include the "deprecated" source file in the standard Makefile build rule. Postgres, for instance, has for some time just used whatever is in the distributed tzdata.zi file. So we'd either continue to support these zones, or not, depending on what happens in the build process for that file. I don't currently have an opinion on whether changing that would be a good or bad thing ... but as far as I could see, you didn't say what you wanted to happen. regards, tom lane