On 09/03/2013 01:10 PM, Lester Caine wrote:
I see no reason we should not have the same confidence with most of Europe?
Wars are one reason. For example, the current TZ database "works" for Mulhouse, France only because it excludes zones that differ only before 1970, which means we currently don't care that many pre-1970 timestamps are wrong for Mulhouse. If we moved the fencepost back to 1900 we could add a zone for Mulhouse, but we shouldn't use the Shanks data for Mulhouse, because it's obviously wrong (I just checked). Maybe someone could do the legwork to research Mulhouse thoroughly, as we've already researched Paris. But maybe not; and even if Mulhouse is doable there must be hundreds of other locations within France that would need the same level of research, where the Shanks data are wrong or are almost surely wrong Doing all this properly would be a lot of work, and I expect it would be a mistake if we simply tried to shoehorn the result into the current tz database format. I don't have a solution here; I'm merely noting the problem.
So some indication of what IS 'woolly'
That indication is currently in the comments. I suppose it could be automated more, but that also sounds like a lot of work, work that I hope someone else does and not me. You could start by assuming that the pre-1970 data are unreliable unless supported by a source in the comments, where Shanks and Whitman do not count as reliable sources.