On Mon, 8 Nov 2021 at 23:05, Paul Eggert via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
On 11/8/21 13:30, Tony Finch via tz wrote:
The tz maintenance rules as written clearly said that each country should have at least one zone until 2019. That rule started being broken in 2013
If I'm reading the tzdb history correctly, from 2013–2019 the guidelines said only that there should typically be at least one name (not Zone) for each inhabited ISO country or territory. From 1997–2013 the guidelines also talked about names, not Zones. (There were no guidelines in this area before 1997.)
So it appears that there has never been a guideline saying that each country should have at least one zone, and this means no such rule was ever broken.
Here is what it said in 2012: "Include at least one location per time zone rule set per country. One such location is enough. Use ISO 3166 (see the file iso3166.tab) to help decide whether something is a country. However, uninhabited ISO 3166 regions like Bouvet Island do not need locations, since local time is not defined there." It was remove by this commit in 2013: https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/d3b025adb25554ee10b986850371e573df92733e and re-added in the weaker form of "name" after I objected: https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/3d046bc0e4351c658d333d1dcc9c69ab15dfb743 IMO the original definition referred to Zone and not just name. That is no surprise, because it is a very rational way to model timezones. Stephen