On November 23, 2019 10:56:28 PM EST, Philip Paeps <philip@trouble.is> wrote:
I follow tzdata releases pretty closely and try not to diverge from upstream. Not installing backzone links predates my maintaining tzdata
in FreeBSD.
I chose not to install the "backward" zones in the hope that this would more securely deprecate the then-recently-obsoleted old-style names like "US/Eastern", and then maybe they could be completely removed from the distribution if other downstream consumers (only a few operating systems at that point, no language runtimes) would do likewise. Unfortunately, these ancient compatibility links never got deleted, so "backward" now contains a mix of ancient and more recent compatibility links, and users are still using them (or being told to use them by documentation that should have been updated decades ago). -GAWollman